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Monthly Archives: June 2010
And Now for A Not So “Handy” Color Corrector Shortcut
On the heels of yesterday’s “handy” little Color Corrector shortcut, we’ll discuss another, rather obscure but potentially great color corrector shortcut that really isn’t very handy at all. And by that, I mean it’s a rare shortcut that really isn’t designed to be used with your hands!
Here’s the deal: some people who are doing heavy-duty [...]
Posted in FCP Ninja Level Leave a comment
A Handy Little Color Corrector Shortcut
I love the 3-way Color Corrector and use it all the time to balance whites, pull up the midtones and crush the blacks (love that term). In fact, pretty much every frame I process gets the treatment, so I often find myself tweaking color while looking back and forth from a broadcast monitor, my computer [...]
Posted in FCP Ninja Level Leave a comment
The Power of Arranging Your Windows with Shortcuts
After a long weekend, we’re back with a powerful little set of Monday shortcuts to get the week off to a productive start. One of the most commont shortcuts I use in the course of my editing is CTRL U
When you hit this, all the windows in your FCP interface (Browser, Viewer, Canvas, Timeline, Tools [...]
Posted in Intermediate 1 Comment
Snap that Playhead Around Efficiently
In addition to knowing how to switch windows (or “focus”), you need to know how to quickly position your Playhead without using the mouse. These two initial skills are critical because if you’re not using them, you break up the rhythm of shortcut workflows and the shortcuts you do use won’t seem very rewarding. You [...]
Posted in Absolute Essentials, FCP 101 Stuff Leave a comment
On Zooming (And More on My Customization Hypocrisy)
There are several ways to zoom in and out of the timeline and a couple of those methods also work in the Viewer and Canvas. We’ll cover all of them here today, but naturally, we’re going to focus on the keyboard methods because being able to quickly zoom in and out on your work is [...]
Posted in Intermediate 1 Comment
Should You Customize Your Keyboard Shortcuts?
Today’s entry presents a shortcut that I feel should really never be used as it raises the important “meta issue” of keyboard customization. Final Cut Pro provides an excellent mechanism for customizing keyboard shortcuts via the Tools>Keyboard Layout>Customize menu. There’s even a shortcut to get to it: OPT H, but please don’t use it!
While keyboard remapping [...]
Posted in Absolute Essentials, FCP Ninja Level 2 Comments
Audio Scrubbing On and Off
Audio scrubbing can be very irritating when you’re moving around on the timeline, but very useful when you’re trying to pinpoint an edit point. I’ve noticed that a lot of people tend to turn it off and leave it off due to the annoyance factor, but then they miss out on it’s occasional great usefulness. [...]
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Where Toggling “Loop Playback” On and Off is Most Valuable
The shortcut for toggling looping (“Loop Playback”) on and off is pretty basic:
When you hit CTRL L, you do the same thing that menu command View>Loop Playback does. If looping is on and you’re playing your timeline (or a clip in the Viewer), the playhead will cycle back to the start of the sequence when [...]
Posted in Intermediate 1 Comment
Open Stills, Video Clips and Audio Clips in an External Editor