Where Is That Playhead?

In addition to knowing how to switch windows (or “focus”), you need to know how to quickly position your Playhead without using the mouse. These two initial skills are critical because if you’re not using them, you break up the rhythm of shortcut workflows and the shortcuts you do use won’t seem very rewarding. You might know how to make an edit point with a shortcut for example, but if you then reach for the mouse to change windows or move your Playhead, you break the flow and you won’t be as likely to see the full beauty of, or adopt superior shortcut editing methods.

Today’s lesson is pretty easy and it builds on another shortcut to round out your playhead skills.  First of all, let’s remember a key fact about FCP: whenever you edit a clip down to the timeline (hopefully by using F9 or F10 primarily), that new clip’s first frame will start exactly on the frame that is on the right side of the playhead. If you rely on shortcuts, you won’t create tiny one or two frame gaps on your timeline that you might not see immediately but will have to clean up later. Likewise, when you’re starting a fresh timeline, you want to start on frame 00:01. The easy way to ensure that you’re editing directly to frame :01 is by hitting the Home key:

Admittedly, whenever you create a fresh timeline, the Playhead is at frame :01 by default, so it’s not always an issue, but suppose you want to insert a leader or bumper at the head (first frame) of your timeline. If your instinct is to reach for the mouse to drag or click that Playhead to the front of the timeline, you have a bad habit.  Get used to hitting Home as the only way to position your Playhead at frame one. Once you’ve mastered that it’s pretty obvious that End takes you to the tail:

Easy enough.  Now (and of course you already know this), you can use the left and right arrow keys to forward or back a frame at a time:

(for JKL ninjas, holding down K while tapping J or L will do the same thing).  Add SHIFT to the arrow keys and they move a second at a time.  Now you’re cooking.

To take it all to the next level, you should learn how to surf edit points via the Up and Down Arrow keys as well.

If you can avoid using the mouse to move your Playhead around and you can switch window focus with shortcuts, you will get a lot more bang for your shortcutting buck and that will make you use them more. In order to fully master these skills, you might even practice or test yourself by putting the mouse out of reach as you rough cut a timeline.