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.

An FCP tip:

All you long-time FCP users may have discovered this one already, but being self-tought means that I never stumbled across it.

When dragging almost anything in FCP you can ‘slow down’ the effect of your mouse movement by holding down the Command key once you start dragging. This means that you can have many minutes of footage on display on your timeline, as long as you can click on an individual edit or clip, you can roll, ripple, slip or slide at single frame increments. For every couple of pixels to the left or right, you change the value by a frame at a time – even if normally those pixels would represent many frames change on the timeline. You can also drag audio and opacity overlays – even when your track height is small.

Day one of my course with Jamie at Manhattan Edit Workshop. We started by introducing ourselves. Looks like people in the audio and TV industries want to get out of those fields and into editing.

The FCP shortcut of the day that I didn’t know, or forgot a long time ago: Control-W closes a tab in a tabbed window.

The ‘craft of editing’ thought for the morning was: ‘Try to imagine what the movie of your day would be like. What shots would you need to get to illustrate what you do, how you feel. How would those shots go together. Where would the jump cuts be?’ – That’s assuming the film would not be Andy Warhol-style 24 hours long.