Tuesday Tips: QuickView

QuickView is one of those often overlooked FCP features that in some situations can be a seriously useful time saver. It was introduced all the way back in FCP3 when the number of real time effects were limited, but even now it still has some nifty tricks up its sleeve.

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.