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

Today’s tip is for Final Cut Pro and how to work with button bars. So let’s get started. Okay, here we are in Final Cut Pro and we’re talking about button bars and what are button bars. Button bars are these little buttons that you see right here, located in all your windows. So you have a button bar in your timeline. There is button bar in the canvas right here. There is a button bar in the viewer and there is another button bar in the browser. Adding buttons to this button bars are very, very easy. The cool thing about button bars is the ability to quickly click on the button and do something. So for example this button allows me to turn on and off link selection. This one turns snapping on and off. To add button to a button bar, you go to the tools button list or hit the option J. That brings up your button list window.

Now what’s interesting here is, let’s close this up for one minute. What we want to do is want to add a button here to apply audio normalization to any clip. Normally what you would do is you would select the clip. Go to modify audio, apply normalization gain. But let’s make that quicker. Let’s remember that this is under the modified menu under audio, apply normalization gain.

So what we’re going to is we’re going to go ahead and go to tools, button list. Now notice that you all your menus right here. So I am going to go into modify, I’m going to scroll down until I find, here are my audios. Here is apply normalization gain. So I’m going to go ahead and drag that to this here. Then I’m going to go ahead and close this up. And now what I’m going to do is I’m going to select my clip that I want to go ahead and apply in the normalization gain too. And then I’ll have to just select and click on this button. And then you see here that it—the applying normalization gain window pops up. It’s that simple.

Now to remove a button from a button bar, it’s extremely simple. All you have to do is drag it outside of it, drop it and it goes away. The other thing I wanted to show you was how to save a button bar. So let’s say you added buttons to all the locations here to the canvas to the viewer, to the browser and to the timeline and you’ll like the way it is. Now you want to go ahead and save all those buttons so that you have it there whenever you need it again.

The way you do that is, what I’m going to do first just because there is no way to once you change your buttons, there is no way to go back to the default. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to tools. I’m going to go to button bars. I’m going to say save and I’m going to call this default button bars. So now if we go to tools button bars. You see default button bars.

Now you will notice that there are three other button bars. One is for multi-clip editing, the other one’s for media logging and the other one is for audio editing. So if you look at this here at the browser, it is pretty empty. If I go to tools, button bars, media logging, you can see that there is a whole bunch of buttons here now. And there are some buttons added to the viewer as well.

Now I can go back to my tools, button bars, go back to my default buttons and then everything goes back to the way it was before. So I’m going to go ahead and go to tools, button list. We’re going to go to modify and we’re going to go to apply normalization gain. Add it there. Close that up. I’m gong to go to tools, button bars, save. I’m going to call it TDMD audio sample. Hit enter or click save and you see that under tools, button bars TDMD audio sample is right there. So if go back to default, my button is gone. But if go to tools, button bars, TDMD, audio sample. It’s back there. That’s all there is to button bars.

They’re an extremely powerful way of simplifying your editing. So I encourage you to use it. I hope you enjoyed today’s tip, until the next one. This is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude. Chou.