final cut questions
 

Hi,


I have a couple of final cut questions.
I'm dealing with these project with large numbers of clips that need certain adjustments.
For example stretching and positioning. Is there a way to edit parameters of all selected clips or somehow for a group of clips?
Also, is there a way to add standard transitions on beginning and end of a group of clips? Since I have hundreds of clips in the timeline and pretty much all of them use a short fade in the beginning and the end, it would save a lot of time.

And question number three. For some reason some of my keyboard shortcuts don't work. For example the undo shortcut. This is really annoying. I use my custom keyboard layout an even added a second shortcut for undo, but both of them don't work. Is this a known problem?

thanks,

David

For the first question, if I understand it correctly, you should just be able to edit one clip, copy it, then select the rest of your clips. Then go to Edit > Paste Attributes... This will bring up a box that allows you to pick which attributes to apply to the rest of the clips.

As far as simultaneously applying the same transition to many clips goes, the only way I know how to do that in FCP is when you add them to the timeline. You set the default transition and then drag drop the clips onto the "Insert w/Transition" target of the canvas window. This assumes the duration of the clips in your bin is what you want or you are willing to adjust each one with the roll edit tools (tedious).

Another way is to use the ability to paste a transition onto a track. Pasting occurs on the currently selected track at the current position. THis is tedious (especially without your keyboard shortcuts working) and I have had trouble pasting transitions that I customized. YMMV.

As for the shortcuts not working, I would search the Apple discussion boards. Sounds like the shortcut file is corrupted and I cannot see on my system which file that might be. I see a folder named "Keyboard Layouts" under ~/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data but it's empty and I DO have my own custom shortcuts. You may just want to try the menu command under Tools->Keyboard Layout to reset it to the defaults.

Question number three.
I think David ran into the non-US keyboard problem in Leopard: shortcuts do not work in non-US keyboards (in my case it's Italian keyboard, but I read about other countries too).

There is a workaround for both FCE and FCP:
- open the International panel in System Preferences
- click the Language tab
- drag "English" to the top of the list (on top of the current language: German I guess)
- drag back German to the top of the list
- close System Preferences
- (close if necessary and) open FCE or FCP: shortcuts should be fixed.

This seems to work till the next system startup; then you have to repeat this procedure...

In FCP, after the operations described above, you can also save your keyboard layout, so you may load it next time directly from FCP (not possible with FCE) without going back to the System preferences.

Piero