Buttoned down

Going back to technology, we explored how to customise the FCP user interface, something I’ve done with browser columns and window layouts, but not keyboard layouts and button bars.

The good thing about invoking the button list is that you can find many commands that you haven’t stumbled over before. You can play just the current marker (from the marker before the play head to the marker after the play head – Control-option-6) or play until the next marker (Control-option-1). I could re-assign the commands, but for now it might be more useful to add them as buttons to my Timeline window (they also work in the Viewer and Canvas windows as well). You can use these commands to see what a subclip of a marker might be like, or to simulate what a visit to a marker delineated section of a video on a DVD might look like.

I also discovered that you can momentarily see specific frames if you hold down control and tap the up arrow (the last frame of the clip before the current one) or the down arrow (the first frame of the clip following the current one). If you add shift, you go one clip further in each direction.

So, my tip is to open the Button List (option-J) and explore some of the commands you find there.