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Quickly Shift Transition Points
If you have placed a transition on an edit point and you are not quite satisfied with the position of that transition, you can certainly grab your Roll Tool and roll the edit point one way or the other (handle permitting), but you might first want to try a quick OPT 1, OPT 2 or OPT 3 to quickly toggle the way the transition is aligned with the edit point (note that you must first select the transition):
These shortcuts modify your transition so that it either “starts on edit” (OPT 1), “centers on edit” (OPT 2), or “ends on edit” (OPT 3).
You may be familiar with these options as they are available if you double-click the transition open into the “Transition Editor” which appears over the Viewer (and is vry handy for fine tuning transitions because you can easily see how much “handle” you have available).
So how do they work and why would these commands be handy? As an example, let’s say you have a default one second cross-dissolve applied to an edit point in a 30 fps timeline. Let’s say you’re not quite satisfied with the position of the dissolve because you can see some undesirable movement in the handle frames of one of the clips (which are now visible in the cross dissolve). By default, the transition is “centered” on the edit point, but if you select the transition and hit OPT 1 to “start” the transition on the edit, the transition will shift 15 frames to the right, such that it will now begin on your original edit point. The result is the same as if you had rolled the edit point 15 frames forward but it’s a little easier to just hit OPT 1, isn’t it? OPT 3 moves it to the left so that it ends on the original edit point and OPT 2 returns you to a centered transition.
Now of course this assumes you have adequate handle to make this shift and sometimes the better fix is to use the Ripple Tool to adjust one or the other clip, but for a quick way to adjust a problematic transition, I find it easy to just try a quick OPT 1, 2 or 3 first.
Remember it this way: you have 3 options with every transition.