Making the Switch: FCP7 to Avid MC6 - Delete, shift-delete, Mark Clip and Marker

Cut.N.Color on PVC by Steve Hullfish

In Part 1 we covered the JKL keys, IO keys and zooming in the timeline. In the previous installment, we covered Insert, Overwrite, Replace and the Pen Tool.

In this, the 3rd part of our FCP to Avid thesaurus, we’ll translate the delete and shift-delete functionality of FCP; Mark Clip and Marker.

To be honest, I switch back and forth A LOT between classic FCP7 and Media Composer. One of the “muscle memory” things that always trips me up is that - even though I’ve been on Media Composer much longer than FCP - I LOVE the delete and shift-delete method of lifting or extracting clips from the timeline, and that is NOT the way Avid does it.

If you are an FCP editor you know that if you have a section selected by either clicking or marking with an in and out point, you can lift that section out and leave a hole in the timeline on the selected tracks by simply hitting the DELETE button. Similarly, if you want to extract that section and ripple the timeline so that it DOESN’T leave a hole in the timeline, then you use SHIFT-DELETE.

Avid can do the exact same thing, but it does it with keys that are designed to do it instead of the delete key. This is actually a very useful thing, because you can map the Lift and Extract keys anywhere you want them instead of having them locked to the delete and shift-delete keys. The Lift and Extract keys are conveniently colored the same in Avid as they are in FCP. The red arrow button lifts and leaves a hole and the yellow arrow button extracts and ripples, leaving no hole or gap. In Avid, the default UI has the Lift and Extract keys mapped under the Sequence Monitor (which is the right hand monitor, similar to the Canvas Monitor in FCP). read more...