The trick is to drag it to the column header:

and when you release the mouse button, the clip moves to the top level of the bin or project:

Incidentally, this also works in the Finder.

If you’ve got a long chunk of footage marked up, sometimes it is useful to only preview up to the out point. Thankfully it’s easy - put the playhead anywhere between the in and out points then press Shift-P and FCP will start playback from the current frame and stop on the out point.

If you go to User Preferences > Timeline Options, you can change the default video and audio tracks to any number you like.*

* OK, well any number up to 99 then!

If you’re using FCP6.0.2 or later then there’s a useful feature that allows you to override this setting and launch FCP with a single blank project. Simply hold down the Shift key until the about screen disappears and you’ll see only the very famous ‘Untitled Project 1′ and nothing more.

So what is QuickView? Basically it’s a fancy name for RAM preview. Anyone who’s used After Effects will be familiar with the software rendering frames to RAM and then playing back in real time. Where QuickView takes RAM preview to a new level is that it updates itself automatically whenever you make changes.

So once you’ve started QuickView playback, you can tweak away at effect parameters and very quickly see the result. If you drop the resolution to half or quarter then rendering to RAM will be faster with the corresponding tradeoff in quality. It’s worth mentioning that unfortunately QuickView doesn’t play any audio so you can’t use it to adjust keyframe positions to match up with music or dialogue.

The QuickView window can be found in the Tools menu and by default plays a 2 second range around the current playhead position – that’s 1 second before and 1 second after. You can increase this up to a maximum of 10 seconds range or alternatively mark an in and out point on the sequence and QuickView will use that as the play range instead.

QuickView is well worth a try next time you’re tweaking a complex effect.

It doesn’t end there though. FCP is smart, so if you hold down the Option key and move the mouse over an existing keyframe, then the Delete Point Tool is shown. This allows for very fast addition and deletion of keyframes without having to touch the tool palette.

Martin Baker is the founder of Avid2FCP/Digital Heaven and an Apple Certified Trainer for FCP. During his 13 year editing career, as a freelance and at the BBC, he worked on a wide variety of edit systems including linear, Lightworks, Avid DS and Avid Symphony before switching to FCP in 2003.

• Double-click or drag them from the Video Generators bin in the Effects Browser.
• Choose a generator from the popup menu on the lower right of the Viewer.

Nothing wrong with those two methods, but here are two super quick keyboard shortcuts to load commonly used text generators into the Viewer:

Load the Text > Text generator into the Viewer:
Control-X

Load the Boris Title 3D generator into the Viewer:
Control-Option-X

Martin Baker is the founder of Avid2FCP/Digital Heaven and an Apple Certified Trainer for FCP. During his 13 year editing career, as a freelance and at the BBC, he worked on a wide variety of edit systems including linear, Lightworks, Avid DS and Avid Symphony before switching to FCP in 2003.

As you’ll already know, in FCP you can’t do the Avid trick of dropping a filter onto an empty video track so it applies to all the layers underneath. Traditionally, the FCP solution is to nest the clips and then apply the filter to the nest but that won’t work in this case because you’d have to switch back and forth between the two sequences all the time. Here’s a solution:

1. Load Slug into the Viewer.
2. Press Tab to highlight the duration field and enter a duration longer than your sequence is likely to be. It’s best to be safe and err on the side of overestimating because Slug cannot be extended beyond the duration it was created at.
3. Edit the Slug clip into the sequence on a higher empty video track.
4. Select the Slug clip and choose Effects > Video Filters > Video > Timecode Generator.
5. Double-click the Slug clip in the Timeline and select the Filters tab.
6. Change the settings of the filter to match your sequence. You can delete the TCG text label to save space.
7. Change the size, colour and position of the text as desired.
8. Select the Motion tab and adjust the Crop controls to reveal your background video around the timecode display.
9. Finally, lock the track with the Slug generator so the timecode won’t be affected when trimming etc.

Martin Baker is the founder of Avid2FCP/Digital Heaven and an Apple Certified Trainer for FCP. During his 13 year editing career, as a freelance and at the BBC, he worked on a wide variety of edit systems including linear, Lightworks, Avid DS and Avid Symphony before switching to FCP in 2003.

It’s easier to show than describe so here’s the Timeline window before Shift-dragging on the right-hand handle:

and then after:

You can see that the first visible frame of the sequence on the left hasn’t changed.

Martin Baker is the founder of Avid2FCP/Digital Heaven and an Apple Certified Trainer for FCP. During his 13 year editing career, as a freelance and at the BBC, he worked on a wide variety of edit systems including linear, Lightworks, Avid DS and Avid Symphony before switching to FCP in 2003.