The Best Shortcut of Them All

If you lay out a rough cut by opening clips from the Browser into the Viewer, trim your clips there using shortcuts and send them down to the timeline using F10 (for “Overwrite” edits) then you, my friend, are a shortcutter.

I have called N (toggle snapping) the “King of the Shortcuts” because it is easy to use, easy to grasp and, for many, it is the first useful shortcut they adopt. It works on its own no matter what workflow you use and is thus a shortcut for all people. F10’s greatness however, requires more workflow knowledge and finesse to fully appreciate.

If you are living in the steaming swamps of opening clips in the Browser by mouse-dragging them from thereto the Viewer then dragging the trimmed clips to the timeline or, heaven forfend, you’re dragging your clips directly from the Browser to the Timeline and (it pains me even to write these words) trimming them there, F10 won’t seem like a big deal to you.

Although it’s a step up on the evolutionary ladder, the workflow of dragging your trimmed clips over to the canvas to use the (admittedly very cool looking) clip overlays (which at least present the “with transition” option) is still a relative knuckle-dragger.

If you are using the fully evolved shortcut workflow though, you can surely see the elegance of this fine key. First of all, once you’ve trimmed your clip in the Viewer, you needn’t change focus to the Timeline, you simply hit F10 to send the trimmed clip down where it will land precisely at the Playhead position (and it will still work even if the Viewer is not in focus). Once the clip is placed, the Playhead will automatically position itself at the end of the clip, ready for your next F10‘d cut. With F10, you never send the clip to the wrong place (be sure to use the Source/Destination Target buttons to manage track destinations, which we will discuss here in a future post).

On the whole, I consider F10 the best of all the shortcuts not just for the time it saves you, but for the way it fits into a healthy, efficient shortcut workflow.

Note that (just as with F9) you can add the SHIFT modifier to perform an overwrite edit with the default transition (usually a cross-dissolve).

If you are not currently using F10, I suggest you try it all day today and make this the first day of your new Shortcutter Life.