How to Navigate Gaps in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is CJ South representing expertvillage.com, in this clip I’m going to teach you how to navigate gaps in your timeline. Alright navigating gaps in your timeline, well why would you want to navigate gaps? For many different reasons, mainly though just to make sure that there is no black throughout your video because a lot of times you will be shifting your video around and for some reason maybe your play head was off by a frame or you tried to move it without snapping but it’ll be off and you’ll find like there would be a random frame of black in your project somewhere and if you haven’t found that ahead of time once you lay off and watch it you’ll just go, “awww crap” and then you got to go back and change it, it’s a pain it is really a pain so we take care of it ahead of time. Now first let me show you how to navigate to edit, what an edit is it’s just a point where it’s either an end point or a beginning point of a clip, so if you see here by using the up key I can move backwards okay and if you see it just snaps right to the edge of a clip and then the down key will bring you forward and snap you to the edge of a clip, so every time you hit the down key it’s going to snap to the next edge the next edit point. Alright now if you want to get just to the gaps you need to do two things, shift and option with G so by holding shift G that’s going to snap you to the next gap in your video, so hold shift and hit G, shift G right there it just brings you to the next gap, now holding option G will bring you to the gaps going towards the beginning of your timeline so hold option G, option G and as you see it’s now taking me to the gaps, so now these gaps right here are really small so that’s why this is so important because if you have a huge timeline with like maybe 30, 40 minutes of footage in there it’s just going to be a pain to scrub through all of it and try to find those gaps so just by using option G and shift G you can find those gaps no problem."