F9 Kicks Off “Five F’s Week”

This week we will focus on a very powerful set of editing shortcuts using the F9 through F12 keys. These keys are among the most important in your shortcut arsenal and while you may already be familiar with some or all of them, the goal this week is to be sure you are forming the habit of using them at every opportunity. Hopefully, you’ll pick up a new tip or two on their use and, as is the mission of the FCP Shortcutter, you can spend one full day contemplating, practicing memorizing and committing to each one of these powerful and sometimes interesting keyboard shortcuts.

Today’s entry is the venerable F9 key:

This is the “Insert Edit” key and, when you hit it, you will send your (trimmed) clip, currently in the Viewer, down to the timeline such that it will insert itself at current playhead position and push all the existing content down the timeline to continue, unaffected, after the inserted clip. It makes, for that reason, what is called a “ripple” edit. Because this uses clips from the Viewer, it fits nicely into the whole “open clips from Browser into Viewer, trim and send down” workflow that we strongly advocate (as opposed to mouse-centric approaches).

I don’t use this one a huge amount personally because I’m not often coming in and inserting wholly new material (more often, I’m rearranging existing content and we’ll discuss some keyboard techniques for that in a future post), but here’s an example of where it works beautifully: adding bumpers and leaders. If you find yourself regularly doing a “select all” and using your mouse to move all of your content down the timeline in order to insert a bumper, leader or some kind of text card header when you complete your cut, try simply hitting HOME to send your playhead to the head of the sequence, opening Browser content into the Viewer (if you’re doing something with a text generator, you’re already in the Viewer) and hitting F9 to perfectly and cleanly insert it.

The other thing to know about F9 is that it also works with the SHIFT modifier, which adds the default transition (usually a cross-dissolve) as you make the edit. If you are planning to add crosses later or are working to a formula or super-tight script, this is also a huge timesaver.