Changing Options When Customizing Your Timeline in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is CJ South representing expertvillage.com, in this clip I’m going to continue to show you how you can customize your timeline. Now the timeline options tab, starting time code, you can change it to basically whatever you want, what I’ve seen some people do that tends to help is if you shot on multiple tapes on different cameras to keep track what they’ll do is at the beginning here at this 1 hour mart they’ll put a 2 for camera 2 or tape 2, a 3 for camera 3, 4 for camera 4 and so on and so on just to help them keep track via the time code because most time you won’t be recording over an hour unless you get one of the newer tapes that can record up to like 89 minutes I think it is 83 minutes. Now this button here for dropped frame I always uncheck that other than uncheck cause what that will do is that will pop up a little warning as your playing for your timeline that says, “when it drops a frame” and when it drops a frame it’s basically because your computer for some reason wasn’t fast enough at that moment and couldn’t play it full time at a real time, so if it just drops a frame in playback mind you, this is just playback so it’s not actually dropping anything this is just during playback it’ll warn you and it really becomes a pain in the butt so I just uncheck it. Below that is your track size, alright now this is the size of your clips down here as far as viewing wise, watch what happens when I change this…I’m going to change it to medium, my clips just got a lot larger, okay if I change it to large they get even larger, you can view the thumbnails on the clips easier now and it’s just a lot easier for you to see, so if you have a large monitor that can really help so you can go from large which is this large to the smallest which is called reduce which is just like tiny graphics, it all depends on what you’re working on and how big the project is so we’ll just leave it at small for now. Thumbnail display this is what is displayed on your clip, okay as you can see my clip here is tape 5-10 and it has an image next to it a thumbnail that’s because I’m on name+thumbnail, if I click name no more thumbnail, if I click filmstrip and it just changes all together into only thumbnail, filmstrip is a little weird to work with normally I stick with name or name+thumbnail. Below that is now audio tracks, if you notice here down in your audio track you have A1, A2, A3 and then A4, this is basically how you want that arranged you can do between paired or sequential, I like to do paired because usually I’m working with stereo so by making it paired it just makes a little bit easier to tell which track is which because instead of having A1, A2 it’s just your stereo signal will now be on just an A1 and they’ll just be labeled A and B but that’s just my personal preference. Track display, this is just another option more option for showing your key form overlays, your audio, your through edits, duplicate frames, audio controls and I’ll come back to that in a different session."