Well been editing on FCP for a while, and something that has always bothered me, and I've never found a way to deactivate this helpfull thing:

Whenever I edit from the viewer and insert footage from the viewer to the timeline (or any other manner) the live window then becomes the timeline. Any setting anywhere to maintine the live window as the viewer and NOT automatically become the timeline where I just dragged footage to? It sounds stupid and silly and it must be a checkbox somewhere, but I can't find it, and gave up looking in the manuals.

thanks

The Q key will set the focus back to the viewer.

Unfortunately not, there is no way to set up FCP so that it will always keep focus in the Viewer after making an edit, it has a set of interface rules it plays by and it sticks to them (however, one of those rules does do what you want):

1) Drag and Drop editing ... focus stays in the Viewer window after the edit.

2) Keyboard shortcut editing (F9, F10 etc) ... focus switches to the Timeline window after the edit.

3) Canvas window button editing (clicking the Insert/Overwrite etc buttons in the Canvas window) ... focus switches to the Canvas window after the edit.


As Michael notes, the Q key is the default shortcut to toggle between Canvas/Timeline and Viewer ... if you have suitable hardware or software you can always make use of a macro to perform an insert/overwrite edit and then immediately return focus to the Viewer window, all in a single keypress.

Hope it helps
Andy

Andy, do you recommend any particular macro software to do this?