Five F’s Week Concludes With A Superimposition

The F12 command is an interesting beast indeed. If you have a clip opened in the viewer and hit F12, it will place that clip in the track above a clip in the timeline that your playhead is parked over.

At the most basic level, this means that if you want to superimpose say, a lower third (or sometimes “name strap” in the UK) over a clip on track 1, F12 will send the Viewer clip to Track 2. Sounds easy enough, but there are several interesting features and caveats to this powerful command. Read on and please bear with me because once you understand this command, it can be a really great shortcut.

• The superimposed clip (the one you’re sending from the Viewer) will be automatically trimmed to fit the clip it is overlaying! This is a huge factor, and it also means that, unless you want the superimposition to run from its head, you should set an in-point and it will automatically trim the out point to match the clip below. And yes, back-timing (setting just the out-point so that the in-point is what is automatically set) will work too. This automatic trimming feature is this really this shortcut’s “secret sauce.”
• The command recognizes the target/destination tabs such that, if you want to superimpose over a Track 2 clip stacked above Track 1, you will need to reset the destination to Track 2 (so it will superimpose and land on Track 3). You cannot (as is sometimes the case in these situations) 0verride the destination by merely selecting a clip on Track 2. In fact, if you have content on tracks 1 and 2 and you use F12 while the destination is still on Track 1, an odd thing happens: all of your Track 2 (and above) content for the entire timeline is moved up a track and the superimposition is placed on the newly cleared Track 2! How odd. Try this and see for yourself.
• If you want to superimpose on track 3 (you have content on Tracks 1 and 2), but want the superimposition trimmed to match the duration of the Track 1 clip, you can override the trim by setting in and out-points on your timeline. That’s pretty useful.

Whew! So what’s the bottom line?

OK, here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you are in the most common scenario of having your content on Track 1 and you want to float some supers over certain clips (lower thirds or other captions like “actual footage” or “footage courtesy of…”), you simply cannot beat this for quickly laying neatly trimmed super content down. Just open the content to be superimposed (or maybe you’ve just created text in the Viewer’s text generators and it’s ready to go in the Viewer), set an in-point (or out-point for back-timing) if needed and F12 it on down.

Even if you need to make some minor adjustments later (like adjusting the out-point back or maybe fading it out by adding a cross-dissolve (using CMD T of course), this is a very fast and easy way to rough it down. Sure beats futzing with the in and out points or putting it down too big and dragging the out-point back with your mouse, right?

In certain situations (or for laying out your rough cut) this can also be a huge timesaver for laying down extensive captions or foreign language subtitles (which can be pretty grueling). It’s the automatic trimming to fit the underlying clip that makes this so powerful.

Just remember this: if you have a simple need to cover a clip with something else, and you’re on Track 1, superimpose with F12 and save some serious time.