How to Use the Visibility, Lock, & Auto Select Controls in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is CJ South representing expertvillage.com, in this clip we’re going to talk about the visibility lock and auto select controls. In the last clip you briefly heard me just kind of touch on locking layers, so in this clip we’re just going to cover that even further and visibility and auto selecting. So let’s start with locking layers, to lock layers on the left here you just see these little lock icons and if you click it you basically lock the layer and by locking that layer you’ve now stopped any actions from being taken on that layer and it’s marked by these lines that go through it these black lines, all across your video and any blank spots or audio. Here’s your audio one’s again the audio and video ones don’t link together so if you lock video 1 you have to independently lock audio as well which is good for you, so like let me try to move a clip on there, it’s locked I can’t move it my cursor has an X next to it, it doesn’t want me to move it there you can’t bring anything into that, I can drop my audio but no video will show up, so it just stops anything from happening on that layer. Now your visibility control is to the left of this, this little button here this little green button and that basically makes it so you can’t see it, it takes away the visibility of its layer so I click that I no longer can see what’s on that layer or if I click track 2 I can’t see what’s on that I now see what’s below it but again just like the audible button if you click these and you had files that were render you loose that render and the have to re-render when you bring it back up, so it can be a bit of a pain it just depends on how render intensive your timeline is. And now the auto select tool we covered that kind of when I talked about the auto select blade tool, now auto selecting basically means that if you have some type of function that uses auto select this is how you would control it, right now they’re all selected so like the control V key which control V is for the auto select blade tool, right now that just selected that just cut these layers, watch I’ll show you again…it cuts the layers because they’re all auto selected, so instead of you actually selecting which layer you want to cut yourself you just auto select it. Now this is really nice for when you’re playing because by toggling these other two off I now left just track 2 to be cut, so now if I hit control V I only cut that second track I don’t cut any of the other tracks so let’s say you want to play through it but you don’t want to cut the bottom layer you just want to cut the second layer you can play and as you go just hit control V, control V just hit it a few times and now you see the only thing that was cut was this second layer."