Markers! Markers! Markers!

Good old Markers! I think virtually everyone uses ‘em and today’s introductory hint kicks off a week long series on Markers. Of course you can leave a marker on either an individual clip or on the timeline and you can do it by hitting either the M key or that little accent key called a “grave” (as opposed to the acute). You know–it’s the one under the tilde!

So what can I say about markers that you don’t already know? Well, if you read the shortcutter regularly, you already know that, if you leave them in clips, you can turn them into subclips (a very cool stunt). You might also know that there are actually several kinds of markers: your basic informational marker, compression markers, chapter markers and scoring markers. You can read more about the various kinds here, but here’s my quick take on each of the specialty markers…

• Compression – if you are going out to DVD compression, you can force a “P frame” in situations where the action is changing rapidly and you want to ensure a smooth compression.  I like to place them on the first frame of a title fade up, for example to make sure it doesn’t jerk.
• Scoring – only really of value if you are scoring with Soundtrack pro.
• Chapter Markers – if you are going out to DVD, I highly recommend adding you chapter markers in FCP because you will have preceise control. If you wait for DVD Studio Pro to add your Chapter markers, you will have put them on P-Frames. I tell my students that I believe chapter placement, in most cases, should be part of the Editor’s job or it will be butchered a bit in the authoring process.

As for the garden variety marker, you can use it either to put notes into your clips or timeline or you can use it as a way to lay down a visible mark on your timeline for timing or other purposes. Note that, if you want to leave a marker in a clip while on the timeline, you need to select that clip first–if no clip is selected, the marker is placed on the timeline itself (and appears up on the “ruler”) If I am roughing out a 30 second piece, I like to place a marker at 01:00:30:00 on the timeline for a visual reference.

If you are using markers for alignment, did you know that if you grab a marker specifically with the Selection Tool, your marker will snap to things (if snapping is on, of course)? If you just grab and move a clip normally (not by the marker), the markers in your clip will not snap to things. Very handy.

One of my favorite uses for markers (which I wrote about here) is to use them as a means of recording notes that a Producer gives me as we review a timeline. As we review the piece and they give me notes, I like to add a marker for each note and type the instruction right into the marker. Later, when I want to go through and make the requested changes, I just ride up and down the timeline from marker to marker using SHIFT Up and Down Arrows and as I tick off each edit, I delete the marker in question (and we’ll discuss the fine points of marker deletion, updating and other tricks later this week).

It should also be noted in the interest of completeness that, while SHIFT Up and Down Arrows are a great way to surf markers, you can also do this with SHIFT M (go to next marker) and OPT M (go to previous marker).