All About Zooming

There are several ways to zoom in and out of the timeline and a couple of those methods also work in the Viewer and Canvas. We’ll cover all of them here today, but naturally, we’re going to focus on the keyboard methods because being able to quickly zoom in and out on your work is a big factor in your efficiency and speed. First of all, there’s the command to make your entire timeline “fit” in the window:

Note that this will essentially give you a “bird’s eye” view of your entire timeline and, if used in the Viewer or Canvas, will zoom the video to fit the full Viewer or Canvas window (however big that may be–this is not to be confused with a 100% view). Think of SHIFT Z as a good starting point or “reality check” for further zooming operations.

Another realted shortcut that I think (which I think is less well-known) is SHIFT OPT Z

This command will fit whatever clips you have selected to the timeline view. This is a very handy way indeed to zoom in on a set of clips you want to work on.

Next we have the CMD minus / equals, or in this case, we call it the “plus” key (you do not have to add SHIFT in FCP to achieve the “plus” aspect of this key):

This zooms in or out on whatever window has focus (Viewer, canvas or Timeline). CMD – (minus) zooms out incrementally and CMD + (plus) zooms in incrementally. The next command of the group is OPT - or OPT + which does exactly the same thing as CMD - or + above, but it only zooms the timeline regardless of which window has focus:

Now here’s where it starts to get interesting, but you’ll have to click through for more…

Up until mid-2006, I generally thought of OPT -/+ as the best way to zoom in and out of the timeline (which is something I do constantly) and I memorized that command as my primary zooming tool. I thought of CMD -/+ as my zoom tool for the Viewer and Canvas. Sure, there were times when it was nice to zoom the timeline without having to shift focus, but they were rare.

OPT -/+ was not perfect, but it was the best thing going. Why not perfect?  Well, the one problem was that if you had a clip or clips selected anywhere on the timeline, either command (CMD or OPT -/+) would zoom on that clip. If you had no selections made, it would zoom on the Playhead. I realize that in their infinite wisdom, the Apple team had given us a multifaceted tool that could do lots of things, but I was constantly zooming way off to some forgotten selected clip when I usually just wanted to zoom on the Playhead.

What happened in 2006, you might wonder? Well, apple added a new command called Zoom in/out to Playhead!  As an Apple-Certified Trainer, I knew about this first thing and, as I read through the change log, I was so thrilled I got up from my desk and went to tell my wife the good news (she’s an FCP editor too). Only problem was, they did not assign it to a shortcut.

I happen to have a very firmly held belief that one should not customize their keyboard layout and I was not about to change the function of either CMD -/+ or OPT -/+, so I instituted the one and only customization that I indulge in:  I assigned Zoom in/out on Playhead to the (previously unused) OPT CMD -/+ slot:

This gave me a tool that I could always depend on for zooming on the Playhead and, even though I have to customize every workstation I sit down at, it’s no problem because I’m not befouling an exisiting shortcut (a mortal sin) and I leave it for the next user with a clear conscience. If the proper Apple engineer ever reads this, I would be delighted to see this logical keyboard shortcut officially implemented in the app so I don’t have to do that any more.

Well, that’s about it on zooming… er, uh… I did promise to discuss all the methods of zooming so, as much as it pains me, let’s go over the other, vastly inferior methods available:

You can use the Zoom Tool (which is accessed via the keyboard shortcut Z), but you hardly get points for using that shortcut as it just turns your mouse pointer into a little magnifying glass and when you click with it, it zooms in the same increments as the above keyboard shortcuts.  Seems like a kludge to me.

You can also use the infernal GUI stuff at the bottom the timeline:

Note that the horrible little wheel (A) will zoom the timeline, the drag tabs (B) will do exactly what you expect and you can use them to move your timeline view without zooming by simply grabbing it in the middle somewhere (C) and dragging it (I prefer to SHIFT Z, move my Playhead with JKL or the up and down arrow keys and then zoom with keyboard shortcuts from there, but that’s just me). The one nice little feature down there is that little purple line (D) which indicates where your Playhead is–especially useful when the playhead is out of view.I often use it as a quick visual reference.