Tuesday Tips: Play Rate

Most editors love the JKL keys for navigating through a clip or sequence at different speeds but did you know it’s also possible to access these fast playback speeds directly?

If you open the keyboard layout window and search for “rate” you’ll see a list of 12 playback rates from -6 to +6. These rates match the speeds available with JKL, so a play rate of 1 is normal, 2 is 2x speed, 3 is 4x speed and so on up to a top speed of 32x.

By default, these commands are mapped to the Control-F2 to Control-F12 keys but beware…some of these combinations are used by the Mac OS. I prefer to remap them to the numeric keys on the QWERTY keyboard because I always use the numeric keypad to enter timecodes.

So in my layout, I have the negative speeds on numbers 1 to 5 then the positive speeds on 6 to 0 (I don’t bother assigning the -1 and +1 play rate commands). It can be very handy to be able to instantly go from 32x forwards to 4x backwards when searching for a particular moment.

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.