V for Victory

Today we begin a 5 day tour of shortcuts that will end up with a fantastic workflow that will, if you are not currently using it, revolutionize the way you finish your videos in the timeline. Because we are starting with a couple of “building blocks,” today’s shortcut won’t really give you much on its own, but it will help us to illustrate a couple of important concepts. The shortcut is V (no modifiers):

If the timeline has focus, hitting V will select the nearest edit point to your playhead.  Why this is so powerful will become more apparent in a couple of days, but for now, let’s get this this one down pat and thoroughly understand how it works.

First of all, there’s a caveat: it selects the nearest edit point on Video Track 1 only, unless you use the “auto select controls” to cause the 2nd or 3rd video track to be selected. We will cover the auto select controls shortcuts later (and they’re worth knowing), but you need to understand them and here is a great article from LAFCPUG (the Los Angeles FCP User Group) to get you up to speed.

Another thing about selecting an edit point with the V command is that, once that edit point is selected, you can surf back and forth through the other edit points on your timeline by simply hitting the up and down arrow keys (much as you surf unselected edit points with the same arrow keys). As you change edit points, they will remain selected! This will prove to be very useful as we start building our powerhouse workflow.

For now, just try V and try surfing up and down the edit points with the up and down arrows so you are used to it. We’ll add another layer tomorrow.