How to Use the Linked Selection Button in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is CJ South representing expertvillage.com, in this clip I’m going to explain the linked selection button. The linked selection button is over here in the upper right corner of your timeline, it’s right next to the snapping tool and as you can see the quick key for that is shift L and right now it’s on and you can click it just to turn it off. When it’s depressed which is on let me show you how this works…when I select a clip that has audio they get selected together, okay and I can move them up together, down together to the side together, they stay connected they’re like little buddies hanging out. When I deselect it and I go to click on them they are no longer linked up, they’re now totally separate of each other now these are not stereo pair if these were stereo paired they would get selected together but your audio is now separate from your video so you can shift your video from the audio, shift it back, you could even make it shorter or you can cut it independently of the audio so you can actually have something else as audio playing over another video and then you can have some sort of fade in between. So this is really good especially when you’re doing dialogue between two people, this is called like J and L cutting to where some else is talking but some one else’s face is being shown, the reaction shot and this is how you would cut that together, just by unlinking these clips. Another way you can achieve the same affect is to you can keep it linked and then you can just lock the layers but when you do that it’s just more work because then you have to go back and you have to unlock and all that jazz, so just by leaving that unlinked you can go ahead and just move your video around and your audio independently of each other so you have a little bit more control over exactly what goes on and what you’re seeing while you’re hearing something different."