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With all the product announcements (including Apple’s yawner of a Keynote) and the noise and color of the convention floor, it’s easy to forget that MacWorld Expo is also a conference, a place for people to come and learn about the programs that make the Mac a creative tool for so many people. From multi-day panels for industry professionals to Creative Safaris for new users, there’s a range of programs, including the one I signed up for: the Maclab for Final Cut Pro Workflows.

When I signed up for the MacLabs at Macworld Expo 2009, I was excited by the possibility of spending two hours, hands-on, learning tricks and tips about how to unlock the powerful secrets of Final Cut Pro. Secrets that they didn’t want me to know! It didn’t quite work out that way. At the end of the class, I was in possession of three cool tricks that will definitely save time when I go back to editing, but a combination of technical glitches and user inexperience made me feel like I got more of a taste than a meal.

First off, let me say that the instructor obviously knew his stuff. The problem was with the format of the lab itself: two hours devoted not just to Final Cut Pro—a major program in itself—but to Motion and Soundtrack. Added into this mix of three separate professional-level applications, you have a mix of people of “all experience levels.” That was where the trouble started, because it became quickly apparent that some people needed to be taught how to import movie files and place them on the timeline, which is the most basic function of FCP. We spent half an hour (out of a two hour class) covering information that you should know if you use FCP at all. Frustrating.

Once we were past that point, the Maclab started to take off and we were shown a really cool tip: how to create reusable text templates in Motion, something I’m sure will be a major timesaver. I say we were “shown” the Motion effect however, rather literally: whomever had set up the iMacs in the room had installed the entire FCP suite…except Motion. Clearly peeved, the instructor demonstrated the process, we jotted down notes, and moved on.

Next was Soundtrack, and we moved quickly through two extremely useful tips: how to copy and paste ambient noise over a sound glitch (rather than the way to which I was familiar; using the razor tool to cut the sound out and then finagle a bit of room noise into the blank space), and how to time stretch sound in order to make it longer or shorter—without changing the pitch. Two extremely useful tips.

And that was time—two hours had flown by and we hadn’t even touched on Color or DVD menus, both of which had been mentioned in the course description. We got lucky though, as the instructor had DVDs left over from his Power Tools class containing additional training for Final Cut, and I’m anxious to dive into it, free from distractions of people who don’t know where the Timeline is, or who want to know whatever tab in Soundtrack does, even if we’re not going to be using it (anyone who’s been at any conference will know who I mean).

In the end, I got some good tutorials about FCP, and, of course, the instructor pimped his site where we could find even more. But what I wanted out of the class—a feeling for how all the programs in the studio are integrated—was lacking.

Product [FinalCut]