Welcome to the TDMD Daily Tip Podcast. My name is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude.

In the previous Podcast, tip number 11. I showed you hot the snap behavior changed during shuffle edits in how to hide clip names clip names. Continuing the review of Final Cut Pro version 6.0.2, I’ll show you how the new Playhead centered zooming functionality works and changes to nest the sequences. So let’s get started.

Okay here we are in Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 and of the new features in this version is the ability to zoom in or zoom out on the plate head in the time line, the other scrolling to the Playhead directly. So zooming in and out on the plate head in the timeline will keep the Playheads smacked in the timeline and just zoom in on that. So the way you need to do this before you even get started is you need to map those new functions to a keyword layout. They’re not currently map in 6.0.2.

The way you do that, you go to tools then you go to keyword layout, customize. Now there is lockbox here. You’re going to need to unlock that and then put your mouse on the search and go ahead search for Playhead. You will six results, but the last three that we’re looking at which is scroll to Playhead, zoom in on Playhead and timeline and zoom out on Playhead and timeline.

Now you can go ahead and map them to whatever you want. I’m going to map this to my F16 key. This one to my F17 key and this one to my F18 key, so now they’re all mapped. I can go ahead and close that out and we’ll remember that F16 is for scroll to Playhead, F17 is for zoom in on Playhead and F18 is for zoom out on Playhead. So when I close that up. Now I’m going to go back to my timeline here and I’m going to go ahead and click on F17 and you can see I’m zooming on the Playhead and it’s keeping the Playhead in the middle of the timeline. I’m going to go ahead and zoom out and you can see that Playhead remains in the middle.

Now the other cool thing that you can do is I’m going to go ahead and zoom in. I’m going to go ahead and put my Playhead right there and you’ll see when I hit F16 which was the scroll to Playhead. It will bring it right to the middle of the timeline. It will shift everything over and then I can go ahead and start zooming all the way out or zoom in all the way in.

That is a pretty cool feature in Final Cut Pro. The only drawback is that you need to currently map it. Hopefully in 6.0.3 or whatever the next version is going to be. It will pre-map to a certain key.

Another great new feature in Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 is the ability to open nested sequence and the Playhead position of that nested sequence will match them Playhead position of the parent sequence. So let me show you what I mean. Let me go ahead and go into one of my sequences here. We’ll double click here. So this sequence has another sequence inside of it. So if I put my mouse anywhere, so you can see I have got my mouse on the transition right there where the transition is starting. I’m going to go ahead and double click that and it’s going to open the nested sequence and place the Playhead exactly in the position of where the Playhead was in the parent sequence which is a fantastic feature. Previously when you double click it, it would open it up at the beginning of the sequence or randomly somewhere else. It would never open at exactly where you double click it. So that’s a great new feature that I know I will be using quite a bit.

Well that’s pretty much it for this Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. In the next episode, will cover more updates to version 6.0.2. So until then, this is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude. Cheers.