It’s Never Too Late to Change That Marker

Let’s say you’re reviewing some freshly transferred footage in the Viewer and you’re laying down markers at the beginning of each take (maybe you’re planning to convert some of your markers into subclips later for easy editing). Inevitably, you will hit M to place a marker only to see, a few seconds later, that the take did not actually begin or perhaps you’re only marking usable takes and you wish you could quickly make that last marker jump forward to your current playhead position. well, you can.  Just use SHIFT Grave

Yep, this is the “reposition marker” and its a command worth memorizing. When you hit it, the last marker you laid down moves to your current position. You can use it anywhere between the marker you want to move and the next marker you lay down. It works in the Viewer and Canvas and in the timeline both for markers laid down on the timeline itself (in the timeline “ruler”) or in selected clips on the timeline.

And when it comes to changing markers after you’ve already laid them down, there’s a another little gem: the “edit previous marker” command.

When you hit OPT CMD M, the edit marker window pops up for the last marker laid down–even if it’s way back there. And what’s nice about this is that it does so without changing your current playhead position! This means that you can lay down a marker, play forward a few seconds, decide (maybe based on what you’re seeing as the footage plays) that you would like to change what you wrote in that last marker, hit OPT CMD M, edit that previous marker and resume playing forward without a rewind or Fast forward. Very efficient.

Only problem is, this one (along with some of the other obtuse marker shortcuts) is a little hard to memorize. At this point, you might be suffering a little bit of marker shortcut memory saturation. I understand and, although we will be giving you a little help with that soon, remember that you can always get a quick glance at the marker shortcuts (or at least the major ones) by mousing (yes, mousing) up to the Mark>Markers menu to see the various options–the shortcuts always appear next to command in menus when available.