Okay guys, now that we’ve got through our basic preferences and navigating around the browser, we’re going to go into navigating around in FCP and then after this video, we’re going to get into the viewer, the canvass and finally we’re going to get into the video, the good stuff of editing.

So, let’s begin with navigation. The first thing you’ll notice these windows are all dark gray. In order to select the window, click on it and you’ll see when I do that it turns a lot gray while the other ones are still dark gray. If I click on the top of the viewer, you see it becomes light in gray; this means that’s what window we selected, okay. This is the browser, this is the viewer, this is the canvass over here and this is the time line down here. Now, that’s how you do your window selection.

Let’s talk about navigation; here is your time line, okay. As you can see our time line is fairly long here, okay. So you want to see all your clips fit in the window and you can’t see it because the other ones, you have the scroll down to see in depth as you see but what if you want them all be fit within the window? Easy, hit the keyboard shortcut shift z and boom, as you can see, that fit all my clips into the time line here, note that more off screen.

Now we’re going to play with the arrow keys a little bit, okay. If you hit the up arrow; watch my play hit here, hit the up arrow, you go back a frame, per clip. When you go back here up here to the end, now I’m going to hit the up arrow, okay. As you can see when I do this, it goes to the beginning of the clip. I hit up arrow again, boom it clicks to the beginning of this clip, up arrow again to begin this click. You hit the down arrow, it goes forward to the gauge clip so the up and down arrow keys navigate you through the clips, to the beginning of each clip backwards or forwards.

Now the right and left arrows, you can see my time line is verily inching along here, you hit the right arrow and you forward through your clip on frame at a time. You hit the back arrow, you backwards through your clip on frame at a time, okay.

Now let’s talk about a few more shortcuts here. What if you want—what if you’re at the end of your sequence and you want to go straight to the beginning? Well that’s easy, just hit the home key on the keyboard and it goes boom, straight to the beginning. If you want go straight to the end of your sequence, hit the end key on your keyboard. On a full sized keyboard this will be above the arrow keys. You hit the end key and boom, as you can see it goes right down here to the end, okay. And of course, the space bar plays, okay.

So now, let’s talk about, how to use your timeline; of course you can go down here and you can use this little scroll control here. As you can see the bigger the clip, the bigger the time line, it has this smaller, this little bar gets and I can use this bar to scroll around or I can grab the ends of the bar and open them up like this and this does the same thing as shift z; this will shrink to make your time, zoom in or you can zoom out and have your timeline smaller. See now, it’s really small and that’s how you zoom in, when you use your timeline down here, this little scroll bar, or you can just grab the ends of your little bar here and bring it in and out, okay. Simple enough, easy enough, no problem.
We’ll make it small here, okay. Now let’s talk about navigating around the timeline without using your mouse. If you hit the “j” key—the important keys are the j, k and l keys, okay. They’re swift and they’re efficient and—they are swift and efficient system for controlling variable speed playback from your keyboard. Now it’s important to know this because it really helps, you need to learn it and you’re going to be whipping through your footage like pros do and the way it works is the j, k and l keys are in a row on your keyboard and you use in the control play back speed and direction. The I and O keys which you use for setting in and out points. If you want to set an in point, say I want to set an in point right here, I just hit the “I” key and as you can see, boom, it puts an in point right there. If I want to put an out point, I’ll go to where I want the out point, and hit “o” and there I have outpoint. Now I have an in and outpoint, okay.

So, the common key in the period keys, you can use to trim at it and they’re located below the j, k, and l. the semicolon and apostrophe, those keys control the previous and next edit and this arrangement makes it easy to edit because it plays the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts under one hand. The apostrophe key, as you can see, does the same thing as the up arrow, just about or the colon key, I’m sorry then the apostrophe key does the same thing as the down arrow; that way you’re in conjunction with your j, k and l keys and we’re going to get to that here soon but don’t worry about the apostrophe’s and the semi solons and the i’s and o’s right now, we’re just talking about the j, k and l keys. Their right in a row, okay.

So here’s a rundown on the j, k and l keys. If you press the j key, you’re going to play in reverse so watch my play hit, I’m going to hit the j key, there it goes, it’s playing a reverse. Now how do I stop it? If I want to stop it, I hit the k key, boom, it’s stops. Now what if I want to go forward instead of backwards? No problem, hit the l key and there we go forward; k to stop, okay. Pretty simple, pretty easy, well there’s more than that.

What if you hit the j key or l key twice? Let’s hit the l key twice to see what happens. As you can see the play hit is moving twice as fast, k to stop. I hit the j key two times, now it’s playing backwards twice as fast, k key to stop. And it goes even further, you can hit the l key three times, it will go forward in three speed. Now to zooming along, k to stop, same thing for reverse, hit the j three times and there it goes. And it goes even further guys. Hit the l key four times and it’s going to zoom through at four speed, same way with the j key, hit it four times and you’re going to go zooming back. You can stop by hitting the k key or the space bar, okay. Pretty cool huh?

But there’s a little bit more to it than that even. If you hit the k and the j together, it’s going to go backwards at slow speed, okay. If you hit the k and the l, you’re going to go forward at slow speed. As you can see, I’m holding the j and the l and it’s just clicking forward there. If I hold the k and the j, it clicks back at slow speed, okay. And those are some really quick keyboard navigation controls to get in around in FCP.

Once you learned how to navigate in one window, you’ll probably be pretty proficient in other windows. This was just an overview of navigating around. I went over the browser, you know how to select the windows and you know a few keyword shortcuts to get you around the time line and you know how to set in and out points.

The next video, we’re going to go over the viewers and the control and the viewers because you can apply those to the canvass also. As you can see they both have the shuttle and jog controls and stuff. The canvass has a few extra buttons and we’ll talk about that when we get to the canvass but for the next video, we’re going to go over the viewer; how the load clicks in the viewer, how top use the viewer, what all the buttons do and how it works, okay. And then we’ll move from there, we’ll teach you about the timeline and these little buttons here on the side and all these controls here and then eventually we’ll move on and get into editing and effects but this video’s purpose was to give you a quick rundown of keyboard navigation or just plain, plain old navigation around the FCP interface.

I look forward to seeing you next time where we talk about the viewer. Thanks for watching.