Refresh Your External Video Monitor

For any FCP editor who frequently works with tape decks (and especially if they find themselves switching decks or bouncing between HDV and NTSV or PAL modes), the dreaded “Unable to Initialize capture Device” pop-up error message is a familiar, if frustrating sight.

Usually, you go back and make some changes and often, you will find that alas, you need to refresh your connection to the deck, so you whip your mouse up to the View menu, go all the way down to the bottom and select Refresh A/V devices.  If you’re in trouble-shooting mode, you may need to do this several times and it’s a kludge.

If this sounds familiar, then today’s shortcut is a good example of why we focus on one hint per day here:  it’s finally time for you to simply memorize OPT F12:

While you’re at it, you might as well assimilate the related CMD F12 as well

which is “Play All Frames.” When I’m in trouble-shooting mode, I find I also sometimes have to hit that one too a couple times (and it’s a long, arduous mouse journey, as you may know).

The final command of this related trio is SHIFT F12 which updates the current frame in your monitor.

Why would you need this? If you use the “Play all frames” option above, you are draining processor resources away from your ability to play real-time effects, so you may not want to have that on all the time and, if it’s not on, you’re in single frame mode. Unfortunately, there is not a shortcut assigned to switching yourself to “single frame” mode, but I think it’s something you’re probably only have to mouse up and do once in a while, so I can live with that.  At any rate, if you are in single frame mode, you’ll notice that the external monitor does not update when you move your playhead (and this may well be a strategic advantage at times), so, in order to refresh that single frame display, you hit SHIFT F12.  Pretty cool mode if you are dealing with a processor-intensive sequence and still want to get broadcast monitor reality checks without the concomitant resource drain.

May your decks never lose connection and all your frames play without dropping!