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Get Fast fast
Let’s get one thing straight.
Being fast does not make you a good editor.
There are certain situations in which speed is the premium, either due to deadlines, workload or budget,
but in the long run, being fast isn’t quite enough.
Bearing that in mind, speed is still an important part of your arsenal.
What gets you on your way is mastering your tools
so that you have the quickest translation of what you see in your mind
to what you execute to the cut.
This tutorial won’t cover the more obvious basics of getting faster in FCP,
I think there’s plenty out there that covers that.
Hopefully, there are enough tricks here that even the old dogs haven’t used before.
How to approach binding keyboard shortcuts (and useful non default bound keys)
There are many opposing views on keyboard shortcuts.
Everyone has a preferred configuration so there’s no point quibbling about which is right.
Some people try to get their config as similar to avid as possible.
A person that takes over the station immediately after finds this out quickly
when they try to mark clip with x and finds their in to out ripple deleted.
My preference and approach when I started on FCP was to use the default config for a while before adding my own custom keys.
There’s no pointing spending half an hour setting keyboard shortcuts for an application I hadn’t used.
I used FCP for a few weeks before starting to add commands that I used with some regularity.
Here are some commands that are not bound by FCP by default that I recommend you bind. my bound keys follow, just as a suggestion
| Command |
Action |
| navigate tabs | cmd shift [ cmd shift ] (don’t click tabs any more, what a time waster!) |
| Export Export to Quicktime Export to Compressor |
cmd e cmd shift e cmd opt e |
| Audio Normalization Gain | ctrl shift g |
| fav video effect | ctrl shift numpad (use all 9 keys of the numpad to bind your 9 most used effects) |
| fav motion path | ctrl opt numpad (use all 9 keys of the numpad to bind your 9 most used motion paths) |
| fav audio effect | cmd ctrl numpad (use all 9 keys of the numpad to bind your 9 most used effects) |
| reveal in finder | ctrl r |
| send to motion | ctrl shift m |
| deselect | cmd d (cmd shift a by default but I use it often enough that I don’t want to hold 2 modifier keys to use it |
Find the find tool
The FCP find tool is one of the biggest timesavers of the software.
It’s perfect for finding the media/effect/part of timeline you need.
There’s a reason I bind my deselect key to cmd d.
The find tool searches from the selected file on the browser/effects palette/timeline.
Deselecting forces it to search from the top.
Basically it’s a rapid fire movement of holding cmd then hitting
3df for files in the timeline (See my previous article for useful applications of this)
4df for files in the browser
5df for effects in the effects palette
6df for effects in the favorites palette
This helps most if you know exactly what you are looking for.
So for gaussian blur, instead of opening the effects palette, expanding the blur folder and double clicking gaussian blur it’s
cmd 5df (open effects palette, deselect, open find dialog)
gaus (use a unique part of the full name of effect you need)
enter
the effect you want is then highlighted.
If you want the Chroma Keyer, you might put “chroma” as your search term
but this will bring up chroma key transitions first and you’ll have to scroll down.
It’s more effective to use “keyer”
Here are some phrases for commonly used effects to skip similar situations
gaus gaussian blur
keye chroma keyer
3- 3-way color corrector
flicke flicker filter
spill spill suppressor
interl interlace flicker
This, of course, varies depending on the 3rd party effects you have installed.
To get around this, you can favourite all the effects you absolutely always use
and search your favourites instead with
cmd 6df %phrase enter
Changing durations of files but retaining keyframes across new duration
We’ve all been there before.
We’ve painstaking used the motion tab to make a file move/crop/rotate on a motion path to perfection and now it needs to be 16 frames longer/shorter.
Instead of opening the motion tab and dragging keyframes around, copy the current file, extend/shorten it,
then paste motion/distort/crop attributes with the scale attribute times checkbox checked.
Changing motion effect to fit to fill without affecting sync
Whenever I had to speed effect a clip to fit to a duration, I used to create a new video layer,
move the file up, lock all others, change speed effect, unlock, move file back down, delete video layer.
Now, I’ve realized how slow that was after I starting doing it this way.
- Set playhead to start of clip
- set in point (i)
- set out point at desired NEW end of clip (after speed effect)
- go to canvas window (cmd 2)
- select in/out duration (tab)
- copy (cmd c)
- select clip
- cut (cmd x)
- go to end of sequence (end)
- paste (cmd v)
- speed effect (cmd j)
- paste (cmd v)
- enter
- cut (cmd x)
- go to in point (shift i)
- paste (cmd v)
Make Favourites your favourite tool
As mentioned earlier, I have my most used audio filters, motion paths (for resizing anamorphically stretched footage and correcting it with respect to a graphic crawler)
transitions and effects saved in my favorites. You can search them as suggested above, but what if you have a very specific set that you use all the time?
As you can see from my favorites folder I number them sequentially and bind my keyboard keys to be a modifier combination and the numpad.
This is because the # of the effect is based on creation order and I name the plugins based on that so I remember which number corresponds to which shortcut.
I create it based on frequency of use and over time it becomes second nature.
This makes all my favourite filters, motion paths a keypress away.
So I know instinctively that my motion path to fit anamorphically stretched footage into a gfx donut is ctrl opt 2 for example.
The modifiers for the filters used ctrl are for video, ctrl opt for motion path and ctrl shift for audio filters.
Autosave Duration
Hopefully, there’s been something in the article above that you’ve never used before and it has been useful to you in some way.
If you’re working faster, that means if FCP crashes 29 minutes after your last autosave and you left the autosave duration at its default value of 30 mins,
you’ve lost a lot more work that you need to do again, and that’s terribly demoralizing.
It’s slightly irritating to be interrupted every 5 minutes by an autosave
but less irritating than redoing that complicated key, secondary color correction, multicam cut from 29 minutes ago.
