Navigating with J, K & L in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to show you how you can shuttle your project windows using the j, k, l keys and the space bar on your keyboard. Now let's talk about shuttling through your project using only your keyboard. For this you will need 4 main keys. You have the j key, k, l and the space bar. Now your space bar is your play and stop so you press space bar, play, press it again and it stops; play, stop, play, stop. J is your rewind key. You hit it and your footage will start playing backwards. L is your fast forward key; hit it and footage starts playing forward. Now it wouldn't be rewinding fast forward if it couldn't go faster. So why don't you hit j and hit j again and again and again. Every time you hit that J key it goes faster and rewinds faster. Same with the l key for fast forwarding. Hit it once, just about normal speed, hit it again a little faster, then a little faster again, again and again until you are just zooming through the project. This works really well up in your viewer because now you don't even need to touch the mouse. You can just use j and rewind to a spot that you like and press the i key for an in point and then you can fast froward to where ever you want and press the o key for an out point. You've just done all that without even touching the mouse. Now for more precise controls, you use the arrow keys. The left and right arrow keys. That moves you frame by frame, by frame. So let me show you here. Each time I hit the arrow key I am moving a frame forward or hitting the right arrow key. The left arrow key moves me a frame backwards. So you can get as precise as you want without ever having to touch the mouse."