Here’s one of the greats: the Match Frame functionality. Let’s say you have a clip on the timeline and you want to quickly pull up the source clip from which it was taken in the Viewer. Perhaps you want to use another clip that you know is in the same piece of footage or you want to look for another take and since there are hundred of clips in the Browser, you just want a quick way to pull up this particular piece of source. With the timeline as the active window (it has “focus”), simply position the playhead over the clip and hit F:
The source will open in the window and it will even have the in and out-points marked (even if you had later reset or them or set new ones). How cool is that? And mind you, this is very different from opening that clip in the timeline up into the Viewer (which gives you the little sprocket graphics along the playback indicator) because you are in the source clip now and can find a new in and out and bring that down to the timeline as a new shot–if you’d opened the timeline clip in the Viewer, you could not change the in or out without modifying your timeline clip.
Note that if you want to open the raw source clip in the Viewer (without the in and out points marked), you can hit OPT CMD F
Note that you can then hit SHIFT F to cause that source clip to be highlighted in the Browser so you can see exactly where it is.
And if it was nested in a bin, that all opens up for you as well. Pretty neat.
And that’s not all! If you hit F while the Viewer is active, the playhead will jump to the same frame if it is in use in the timeline! Not sure if you used that cutaway shot of the guy nodding and clapping yet? Just put your playhead on the shot in the Viewer and hit F. If it’s not in the timline, you’ll get an error sound and if it is, you jump right to it. Pure awesomeness.
Note that if the clip you are match framing is not on video track 1, you will need to select it prior to hitting F, but that’s no biggie.
There’s a nice tip as to how to use this in a practical situation after the jump…
So here’s another great hint for using this shortcut: let’s say you want to add in the audio track for a clip (maybe a cutaway) that already exists on the timeline but does not have it’s audio tracks in the timeline–maybe you’ve decided you want to include the “nat sound.” Maybe the audio tracks even got accidentally deleted somehow. Well, use the up and down arrow keys to navigate to the clip in question, select it if not on V1, hit F then, (by using keyboard shortcuts if you’re hardcore), turn off the video source/destination tab and change destinations if needed and hit F10. The audio is now perfectly added and virtually any other way of doing this would have taken a long time.
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