Keyboard shortcut for activating comment box in marker panel w/o stopping playback

[Andy Lewis]

I also want to make notes on footage while I’m watching it without stopping playback – ideally as clip markers but I’ll settle for sequence markers.

The closest I’ve got is having the markers panel open, dropping a marker in the timeline, extending the duration in the marker window with the mouse, then clicking in the comment box and typing. This doesn’t stop playback but is obviously very mouse-heavy and cumbersome.

Prelude will do what you want although it’s no use to me for various workflow reasons.

I tested Resolve a few months ago to see if it will do this – it stops playback when you edit a marker but then starts it again when you finish typing and press enter. I could get used to that and as I remember you can do everything from the keyboard (is this right?) so I’ll be giving Resolve another go in the future.

[Sandra Salajic]

Hi, thank you for the reply. I don’t think you need to extend the marker to be able to type in the comment box (unless of course you want to extend the marker).

Well, I guess this will then stay the only thing I need to use my mouse for while going through footage, which sucks. I haven’t tried using Prelude, maybe I should give it a try. As I understand, it’s great for marking and reviewing footage.

[Daniel Fletcher]

Give this a try. It may work for you.

Lock all tracks in the seq (shift click the audio and video track locks) to prevent markers from being placed on individual clips.
Then when reviewing the seq, pause playback with the spacebar, press M twice to add a marker and then tab, this will move your cursor and you will be ready to type a comment. No mouse needed.

[Sandra Salajic]

Hi Daniel,

that is exactly the workflow I use right now. Except, I don’t think you need to lock tracks in the sequence to achieve this, just make sure that all tracks are unselected and the marker will be added as sequence marker and not as clip marker.

Here is the workflow I use:
stop playback
‘M’ – add marker
‘M’ – open the marker window
Write marker name
‘TAB’ – move to the comment section and enter comment
‘TAB+SHIFT’ – Return to marker name so that you can close the marker window with ‘ENTER’, which you can’t do while in the comment window, as far as I know.

The problem is that for this workflow, you need to stop the playback. When continuing to watch the footage, I often return to the already created comment to add additional text. To do so, I have to use the mouse and click on the marker comment in the markers panel. Then you can continue writing during playback. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found a way to assign a keyboard shortcut for that action.