Scrub Down with JKL

It is surprising to me how many FCP editors I meet who have not actually formed the habit of using J, K and L (known as the “Transport” or “Tape Transport” controls) to navigate backwards and forwards (scrub) in clips.

Most of these slowpokes are inclined to grasp the mouse with one hand while the index finger of their other hand hovers over the space bar. They point and click all over the timeline and start and stop the clip by banging the space bar.  Not only is this a waste of time, but there’re giving up the tremendous control that these keys offer for slewing tape. This is no way to scrub clips, my friend!

Some people also like to use third party devices like the Contour Shuttle Pro which is all well and good, but they make you dependent on non-standard gear and I believe that’s a bad road to go down (same with those silly color-coded keyboards).  I believe the best editors do not need to carry a pile of custom gear along to every gig to make things work.  The most flexible pro can sit down at any edit bay and jump right in if he or she uses native shortcuts.  As a related aside, I also discourage customizing your keyboard shortcuts (with a very few notable exceptions) because that will also make you too dependent on your own one-off set up and you’d be hamstrung if you sat down at my editing station in a pinch and had to get something up to the bird with a stressed out Producer riding your back.  You’ll look like a total klutz and that’s not pretty.

These three keys, once you develop the habit, are among the most important shortcuts in FCP.  You can use them in the canvas, the viewer, on the timeline and they’re especially great in the capture window where they give you perfect control of your tape deck.

J goes backwards, L goes forward and K stops.  But that’s not all.  When you repeatedly press J or L, the speed of your playback increases.  To gear back down, press the opposite key (no need to hit K to stop and restart).  Press J or L while holding K down and you’ve got slow motion (hit SHIFT-S to turn on audio scrubbing, if you desire and you’ve got a great way to pinpoint an audio-centric edit).  Tap J and J repeatedly while holding K down and you step through one frame at a time.

At first, this may indeed seem awkward (so does learning to play the piano), but rest assured, as with most great shortcuts, this one will eventually go deep into “muscle memory” and once you have the habit, you’ll never want to scrub any other way again.