Using the Selection Tool in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. Representing expertvillage.com. In this clip, I am going to teach you how to use the selection tool effectively. In the next few clips, we will talk about the tools and the tool pallet that we haven't quite covered yet. So to start off we are going to talk about the selection tool which as you see in the pallet is the very top selection and it's an arrow; that's it. The key for it is the a key. Now this is used for selecting your clips and moving them around in time line. It works similar to the way that your cursor works when you are navigating your operating system in your finder. You can just clip a click and make it selected as you can see. Let's say you want to select multiple clips. Well there are a few ways you could do that. You can hold the command key while you click and then you will click multiple clips and they are all selected. You can also hold the shift key. So let's say I go to the first frame of this. I can just hold the shift key and now whatever I select, my in selection, every in between the first selection and the in selection will now be selected. This one is shift and I click the end and now everything between that is selected but only on that track. Now let's say I want us to just select a certain amount of clips and it is a little bit too much work to do control and shift. I can just click and hold and drag my mouse to create a box and whatever clips are inside the box, are now selected. You will notice with a selected clip once your cursor moves over it, it turns into this 4 way arrow; up, down, left and right. Basically that is just saying that hey this is a movable clip. You can move it up, down, left and right. So click hold it and then you can move it, no problem. Now if you notice there is only 3 tracks on here. Let's say I want 4 tracks of video. How do I accomplish that? Well a real easy way is just to select the clips that you want to go up there and then just go ahead and drag them up. If you notice I now dragged it up above our final clip, our third track. Now watch what happens when I let go, boom! It just made another track so you can drag them upwards to create new tracks if you need it. Just go ahead and undo that. Now let's say you want to move these up. You will notice a lot of times when trying to move a clip up, you might accidentally shipped it to the right or to the left a bit. You know you try to move it up straight. I don't want it to move at all. Just want it to move up a track. All you have to do is click and hold it and before you move it upwards, hold the shift key and then move upwards. Now you'll notice when I move my cursor up to the left or right, it doesn't move at all. Okay, it doesn't move. It stays still. That way you can keep it exactly where you want it when you are moving it upwards or downwards. "