A Final Marker Tip: Setting Ins and Outs on the Timeline

Last week, we covered all of the keyboard shortcuts related to markers that can be found in Final Cut Pro except for one: “mark to markers.” The shortcut for this this little gem is CTRL A

If you have some makers set on your Timeline (this also works from the Canvas) and you hit CTRL A, in and out-points will be placed on the timeline with the in-point occurring on the nearest previous marker (or current marker, if you’re parked on one) and the out-point being placed on the next occurring marker (or the tail of your sequence if there are no subsequent markers). This one does not work in the Viewer and the expected behaviors for selected clips in the timeline apply: if you have a clip with clip markers selected, the in and out-point will appear on the timeline at those spots, but if you have no clip selected, only timeline markers will be recognized.

I like this one because I tend to line up all my b-roll on one scratch timeline (for easy scrubbing as opposed to opening a bunch of clips one by one in the Viewer and reviewing them). Once I’ve done that, I also tend to use markers to tag certain b-roll shots I like. Later, I can pretty quickly get in and snag those clips with copy and paste to my working timeline.

I also place markers on my timeline at the start of my actual “program” as I frequently use temporary leaders in my timeline which I use for making client review movies (with the leader) and then, once we’re approved, I can just set up an in and out quickly with CTRL A and export my finished piece. Granted, that’s not a huge piece of workflow genius and isn’t a big time savings over using the up and down arrow keys to go to the end of my leader and hit an in-point, but since I am a marker user, it works for me.