Shortcuts to faster cuts

When the edit suite door slammed shut after the two wired producers left, I kicked back from the keyboard of my Avid Media Composer and reflected back on the 12 hour edit session that just ended. The two producers and a director (who left exasperated half-way through the session) had been involved in a long discussion of how to best edit the show and as soon as they came to something of a conclusion they stopped and looked at my screens and said "Ok play that back." While they where talking I was trying to stay in sync with their thought-process since their started to shift in their seats and sigh every time it took more than a minute before they got to see the manifestation of their elaborate thoughts on my screens. The pressure was intense and I was young and didn't have a great hold of how to deal with the situation of having people yelling orders at me behind my back.

Make the right emotional cut instead of constantly figuring out how to make the cut.

As I looked at my slightly trembling fingers and slowly massaged my forearms and thought briefly about how quickly one could contract carpal tunnel syndrome I also felt that there must be a better and faster way of doing things. This was the start for me to become somewhat obsessed with how to edit faster and more fluid in order to be able to keep up with a thought-process and thus freeing up brain capacity to make the right emotional cut instead of constantly figuring out how to make the cut.

The goal became and still is to make the functions of the Avid (or any other NLEs) work as much of an instrument as possible. Something that can be "played" on more than "worked" on. The answers found me in the world of PC-gaming. The button-setup of almost every singel First Person Shooter game focuses the buttons on the far left side of the keyboard in order to always have that corner to orient your fingers. A basic set-up for a FPS centers around the A, S, W, D, shift key and space bar so that's where I started. A basic overview of how I edited showed that the functions I used the most where: overwrite and splice function, choosing between red arrow and yellow arrow, set in point, set out point, clear in and out, lift and extract, and trim mode and choosing the tracks in the timeline and playing the timeline forward and backward. Thanks to the doubling function of the shift-button I had double the amount of buttons available to me within the reach of a static hand that almost never have to move from that corner.

So now I had the basic functions that I needed the most mapped on the direct hit of the button and then what I decided to be the secondary function mapped with a shift button. For instance I have "red arrow" on "s" and "yellow arrow" on "shift-s" or "Mark Clip" on "c" and "Clear In-Out"" on "Shift-c". I worked on this kind of set-up for a couple of years and felt I was getting up to a good speed. My ability to get lost in the flow of editing without having to look at the keyboard or thinking about how to do something and just feel the film increased dramatically. But there was another level that emerged a few years ago again thanks to the gaming industry.

Enter the gaming mouse!

A couple of years ago my trusty mouse broke down and I needed to find a new one. I had not been in the market for one for att while and when I started looking around I saw more and more gaming mouses with a multitude of buttons all over and another thought emerged about how to get even faster and more intuitive. Most NLEs have functions that are only reached by pushing a sequence of buttons. Up to this moment my sequence to enter and conduct a trim looked something like this: shift-drag or click to choose the tracks to trim - shift-D to enter trim mode - shift-Q or shift-W to choose what side to trim - then find the buttons for trimming one frame left or right. I did get pretty fast but most of the functions were assigned to the left hand and almost completely left out the right hand. The idea now was to split up the sequence between the left hand and right hand so that you could be even faster. After trying out a couple of different mouses with a multitude of button set-ups I settled on a Roccat Nyth.

It takes a little while to get used to but now the trim-sequence of button pushing starts with pressing the 4-button with my right thumb to enter trim, shift-Q or shift-W to choose side and then the 2-button to trim one frame to the right or the 5-button to trim a frame to the left then spacebar to review. Right hand-left hand-right hand-left hand.

What about macros?

Yes, I've been down that road. I actually spent a whole weekend making up macros with the aid of a fantastic macro application and found ways to almost completely rid myself of any right hand-left hand sequence. But! On Monday morning I had to be at a studio that didn't have that macro application and they where more than worried about me downloading any programs on to their computers that potentially would grind everything to a halt.

Is it worth it?

There are pitfalls however in making these changes. Changing your muscle-memory takes a little bit of time and you may experience discomfort to begin with. If you are an editor that moves around a lot and sits on different workstations you have to make sure that you have the latest settings saved to a USB or to Dropbox (or the like) so you can easily get set up. My solution to this is to have a travel-kit. It is a hard-case that has a couple of USBs, extra cables, USB-docks, extra hard-drive, mouse and mouse mat. It is always ready to go and makes it easy to move from my workstation at home to somewhere else in a moments notice.

There's a bit of work involved in making settings comparable across the NLE platforms you are using. There are functions that are the same but called different things. Also button sequences are different in scope and jumping from platform to platform takes some getting used to. There is always a moment of uncertainty before the synapses are aligned. If you change a couple of functions on one NLE you have to go in and review your shortcuts of the others NLEs you are exposed to so that you will keep up to date. To me it is all worth it. Mousing around the NLE or teaching yourself a default set-up for each takes a lot longer than to get a system in that saves you clicks, time and frustration.




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