Timeline Editing - Navigating the sequence

Previously, you learnt how to create a sequence and set the sequence’s tracks. Let’s have a look at some of the basics of moving around the sequence and navigational tools. You can drag the positioner all over the sequence to display the current frame in the record viewer. If you want the positioner jump to another point in time, you can do it in two ways. Just click the time-code bar at the bottom of the sequence and the positioner will jump to that point in the edit. Clicking in the scrub bar below the source or sequence viewer will do the same thing. To navigate to a specific time-code, click on the time-code indicator and type in the time-code. After pressing ENTER, the positioner will jump to that specific time-code in the sequence. You can also make the positioner jump a few frames forward or back relative to its current position. For example, click on the time-code indicator and type +5 or -5 and than press enter, the positioner moves 5 frames forward or back from its original position. If you are using a keyboard with a number-pad, you don’t need to click on the time-code indicator to move the positioner. Just type +10 and press enter. The positioner will move forward by 10 frames. You can also make the positioner repetitively move by a number of frames. Click on the time-code indicator. In the calculator, type 5 frames and press ADD or SUB to move the positioner by 5 frames. If you keep clicking ADD or SUB, the positioner will continue moving in that direction by 5 frames with each click. Press enter to close the calculator. Looking at the positioner you will see a small horizontal bar. This is called the “focus point”. You will discover it has many functions in the sequence and this function is track navigation. Pressing the UP and DOWN arrows on the keyboard, you will see the positioner is moving from one cut to another, along the track aligned with the focus point. So moving the focus point up and down between the tracks allows you to choose which track to navigate. If you want the positioner to navigate to every cut on every track, you can force it to do so by pressing CONTROL UP arrow or CONTROL DOWN arrow. In a long or complex edit, you may want to focus on specific points of the sequence to do some detailed work. There are a number of ways you can zoom into the sequence and everyone has their own personal favourite. The first method is to click on the horizontal scroll bar and drag upwards. The upward movement zooms into the sequence. Dragging downwards zooms out. To fit the sequence to the timeline view, you can click the Home icon located to the bottom right of the sequence or press SHIFT+Z. You can also press SHIFT+Z to toggle between the previous zoom and fitting to the timeline view. You can also use the rectangular zoom tool by pressing OPTION+Z and dragging a box to zoom into the region of segments. Now hold CONTROL + OPTION and click and drag to gesturally zoom the timeline view horizontally. Lastly, for a more conventional way to zoom in and out of the sequence, press COMMAND + to zoom in and COMMAND – to zoom out. The pull-down menu at the bottom right of the interface gives you various options to fit the timeline. You’ve already used the first one, which is zoom to width and height. The second is reset the track height. The third is only to fit the width of the sequence to the timeline view and not affect the track height. The fourth and final option is zoom to a selection of segments in the sequence. To pan the sequence left or right, you can use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the timeline view. Or you can press CONTROL+COMMAND and gesturally drag the view to the left or right. The vertical scroll bar also has two functionalities. You can click and drag it left or right to increase or decrease track height. And also, as expected, you can scroll the sequence vertically to show the other tracks in the sequence. You can also use the middle wheel of a 3-button mouse or your Mac’s track pad to vertically scroll the tracks. In the next video, we’ll focus playback methods such as JKL and the different player viewers.