getting monitor to display from timeline
 

I have a monitor output from my Panasonic miniDV deck(which is firewired to a Mac G4/OSX) and it works only during the clip logging phase of my editing. Ideally, I would like to get monitor output from the running timeline, but do not. There must be some command to get timeline video to the monitor. Any thoughts?

Hello Tim,
Your setup sounds similar to mine, so perhaps I can help.

By "monitor" I assume you mean a television or professional NTSC monitor, eh?

If so, be sure that the deck is on when you start FCP and that External Video in your Audio/Video preferences is set to "FireWire NTSC".

Thanks Ken---I'll give it a shot...

go to the Menu and select "View All Frames".

- don

In FCP there is also a bug.... er, I mean "feature", which can prevent your video from displaying. In the canvas or viewer window, use the drop down menu to select "fit to view" and NOT 100%. For some reason, if set the window at 100% and it doesn't quite fit then nothing will show up on your external monitor. This was driving me crazy until a helpful person on the Apple FCP board suggested the fix. It's a pretty common problem...

For keyboard junkies like me, the "fit to fill" quick key combination for ALL windows is "shift z". It will cause the timeline content to "fit to fill" (great for an overview), it will cause the Canvas and Viewer-Video or Audio windows to "fit to fill". Even better yet, use it when setting keyframes in the Motion tab of the viewer. Try it. Now that is helpful. There does appear to be a bug in the Control tab of text generation that causes the fit to fill not to work correctly on the keyframe timeline. Check that out. In any case, the "shift z" combination is one of my three favourite key combinations. The other two:

command z - undo
shift u - preset to first window custom layout

Yes, thank you. For those who are interested in learning all of the nifty key commands for FCP and also many other programs, check out Loren Miller's very handy visual KeyGuide References. The scan guide is cool too.

http://lormiller.home.mindspring.com...O_051.html#fcp
http://lormiller.home.mindspring.com

- don