Aside from scrubbing with J, K and L, the best way to fly around your timeline is often by using the simple Up and Down Arrows to go from edit point to edit point.
It’s a good habit to use these keys to position yourself because, and this is the key thing to remember: they always stop on the first frame of the “incoming” clip (the clip on the right side of the playhead). This means that, when you navigate by the Up and Down Arrows, you’re always going to hit the exact right spot for the overwrite or insert edit.
Closely related is the trick of adding the Shift Key to navigate your timeline Markers.
There are even more cool applications of the Up and Down Arrow command in terms of navigating though selected edit points, but alas, that’s something we’ll explore on another day.
And here’s a related tip. Whenever I am reviewing a timeline with a client present and they’re giving me notes, I like to add a marker for each note and type the notes right into it (you might duplicate your sequence first and then clear all markers with CTRL – Grave which is also known as the the “tilde” key, but more on that another time). To go through and make the various changes and tweaks, I then just ride up and down the timeline from marker to marker using SHIFT Up and Down Arrows and as I tick off each edit, I hit CMD Grave to delete it.
Up and Down the Timeline
Aside from scrubbing with J, K and L, the best way to fly around your timeline is often by using the simple Up and Down Arrows to go from edit point to edit point.
It’s a good habit to use these keys to position yourself because, and this is the key thing to remember: they always stop on the first frame of the “incoming” clip (the clip on the right side of the playhead). This means that, when you navigate by the Up and Down Arrows, you’re always going to hit the exact right spot for the overwrite or insert edit.
Closely related is the trick of adding the Shift Key to navigate your timeline Markers.
There are even more cool applications of the Up and Down Arrow command in terms of navigating though selected edit points, but alas, that’s something we’ll explore on another day.
And here’s a related tip. Whenever I am reviewing a timeline with a client present and they’re giving me notes, I like to add a marker for each note and type the notes right into it (you might duplicate your sequence first and then clear all markers with CTRL – Grave which is also known as the the “tilde” key, but more on that another time). To go through and make the various changes and tweaks, I then just ride up and down the timeline from marker to marker using SHIFT Up and Down Arrows and as I tick off each edit, I hit CMD Grave to delete it.