[Louis Raskin]

So I just found a way to make it EVEN FASTER to cut clips.

If you only have one clip on a timeline you can click “[” to delete everything to the left, or “]” to clip delete everything to the right.

But those keys are all the way on the right side on the keyboard.

And it doesn’t work if you have multiple layers.

So what I do is I get all of my layers stacked up evenly. Then I compound them together. Then I change my keyboard shortcuts to make “C” the “blade all” function instead of having to move my hand in a weird way to click Shift-Alt-B. Then I change the “[” shortcut to “D.”

Now as I’m going through my timeline all I need to do is click “C” which makes the cut, and when I get to the area I want to cut out, I click “D” without even lifting my fingers. And this AUTOMATICALLY deletes the clip you don’t want.

So now I don’t even have to manually click on the clip in the timeline before deleting it. Just clicking “D” right after clicking “C” automatically does that for me.

This way is probably the most efficient way possible to make cuts in your videos. If you are just cutting out silence from your videos you can use Recut and other software to do it automatically. And for all the “um’s” and filler words you can use Descript. But for the times when you mess up your lines or need to edit out certain parts of videos that aren’t those two examples, I think this is the fastest way possible.

[Louis Raskin]

Over a decade ago on Dec 29, 2012 Matt Orfalea asked

“In fcp7 I used to be able to mark in and out points in the timeline and ripple delete everything in between. In my multiple layer fcp x timeline I try to delete all between an in and out point but only the top layer deletes. Wtf? Please help!”

I recently switched from Screenflow to FCX and had the same issue. It IS easier and faster to “I” “O” “Delete” compared to the way the new defaults are set up.

After 2 hours of trying to do what Matt originally posted about I found this thread and realized it’s not possible. But someone here pretty much said you need to think of FCX in a totally different paradigm, which got me thinking in a different way.

What I ended up doing was going into the shortcut menu and changing the “all blade” buttons to “C.” I then changed the “delete/backspace” button to “S.”

Now all I have to do is press “C” at the start of the range, “C” at the end of the range, then click the clip and press “S.”

This way is faster and way easier than the “Shift+Command+B” version and even faster than the “I” “O” “Delete” used in other softwares and the previous version on final cut because of the layout of the buttons on the keyboard. With putting all of the shortcuts on the left side of the keyboard you don’t even have to lift your fingers. It cut down the process of cutting out clips from my movies by 75% or more.

Hope this helps!