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Zoom in/out preference
Does anyone know of a way to change a preference in FCP 5.1.4 to keep it from always zooming IN directly to whatever is highlited (selected) on the timeline? My preference would be for timeline zooming in (by hitting +) to ALWAYS zoom to the playhead cursor and NEVER into a selected clip. This trips me up constantly all day and I’ve been on FCP for about 5 months now.
Every other editor I’ve used ignores whatever you have selected on the timeline and zooms into whatever point the playhead is at. I actually can see no benefit whatsoever to having it zoom into a clip or range of clips that I’ve selected. When I’m zooming in I’m trying to pop into a point on the timeline for more accurate trimming or whatever and I always end up zooming into whatever clip was last selected… or even a section of black (blank) space.
My current method is to TRY to always hit CMD-D to deselect all (set the keyboard mapping for that to match Photoshop) before I hit the ‘+’ to zoom in/out.
Thanks for any insights/workarounds you can offer,
Larry
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3 Replies
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There’s no way to change the behavior. But when you have inadvertently zoomed in on the wrong item, just press the right or left arrow to move the playhead one frame. It will jump the view to that point, which is the point you wanted in the first place. You can also combine it with cmd+d like you’re doing. BTW – before version 4.5 cmd+d was actually mapped to “deselect all.” I have absolutely no clue as to why it was removed. They added Shift+cmd+a to deselect all, which matches other software, but they removed cmd+d and didn’t map anything else to it by default. So after 5 years of FCP I had to start remapping the keyboard. Argh.
Pressing deselect all before you do lots of things is a good idea in FCP. Other editing functions operate differently if you have items selected. For example, if you mark an in/out and do a ripple delete with something selected, the selected item overrides your mark in/out! You might even think nothing happened only to discover later a piece of your timeline is gone!
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You might want to also try using the zoom tool. Press z, then draw a square around the area to zoom on. Faster than cmd+/- and you don’t have to remove your hand from the mouse. I tend to use whatever feels appropriate at the time.
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Oh, I think I like the Z key method! That seems to ignore the ‘selected clip.’
I use an old 4-buttom Microsoft Trackball explorer with the mouse driver mapping buttons 3 and 4 as zoom out and zoom in respectively.
Actually I’d love to be able to use the mouse scroll-wheel to zoom in/out. Even if it needed a modifier key like Option that would be cool – Logic works that way both vertically and horizontally for its tracks. Mostly I use that on a MacBookPro and is the closest thing yet to ‘gestures’ navigation.
One day we’ll be sitting in a coffee shop putting the finishing touches on our production on Final Cut Mobile running on our iPhone.
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