This story is taken from "50 Fast Final Cut Express Techniques."

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If you think digital video is too hard to learn, think again. Apple's Final Cut Express is designed to ease your entry into the world of digital-video editing. Similar to its big brother Final Cut Pro but at a fraction of the cost, the Express version lets you draft storyboard and shot lists, create titles, credits, and other text, and add special effects.

In these two tutorials, you'll see first how to overlay text onto your video clips and then how to add a bolt of lightning to your scene. Because both these techniques use layers, once you've mastered them, you'll be able to modify these steps to create variations on the theme. For example, you can add a logo or make a comet streak across the sky.

We've posted these excerpts as PDF files. All you do is click the links "Text Overlays" and "Lightning Bolts" to open the PDF files in your Web browser. You can also download the PDFs to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you'll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (4 or higher) or the free Adobe Reader, which you can download here.

To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.

Excerpted from "50 Fast Final Cut Express Techniques" by Tim Meehan. Copyright © 2003 Wiley Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduced here by permission of the publisher.