Dive Into Your Imagination

Sometimes you will find yourself working on the FCP timeline wanting to place clips at an exact point in time but suddenly it just SNAPS forward or backward against another clip. What is going on!? No there is nothing wrong with your mouse, it's just a setting that can either be very useful or very annoying but is easily controlled.

Take a look in the upper right corner of your timeline window and you will see a pair of icons called link and snap. Learn the keyboard shortcuts, they are your new best friends: "Shift+L" and "N". One thing you should realize is that if you activate either of these shortcuts WHILE you are dragging your clip, they revert to their setting once you release it. It's a temporary switch. So for example: Say the snap setting is OFF before you move your clip. With the selection tool (arrow) click and HOLD your clip. Push the "N" key while holding the clip. Snap is set to ON. Drag your clip, snap it to another clip then release. Snap reverts to OFF. This is a cool feature but it took me a while to realize what was going on. I kept thinking, "I thought I turned it off!!" With snap off, you can zero in on where you want your clip to lie on the timeline, and holding COMMAND as you do this can help. But most of the time, snap ensures that you have no split second gaps between your edits and that's a good thing.

"Shift+L" is for linking selections. The lame thing is, it only works for video and audio that are from the same footage. Meaning, you can't link one imported song to another imported video clip, nor can you link graphics to video or any other combination unless they were originally linked together to begin with. So really, the only use this function has is to link and unlink clips and their native audio track. Unlinking helps when you just want either the audio or the video on from a clip. Or maybe you need to shift the sound forward or backward for whatever reason, the red numbers reflect the change in offset. But you can also individually select either while holding ALT/OPTION, then delete it. So really, after I think about it, "Shift+L" isn't much of a friend after all. At least not like good ol' snap.

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