Today’s Daily Tip Podcast is sponsored by maker of SUGARfx, creative themes and effects for Final Cut Pro. Check them out at iLearnFast.com.
Welcome to the TDMD Daily Tip Podcast. My name is Marcelo Lewin, the digital media dude. Today’s tip is for Final Cut Pro in how to “Create A Static Region” in your Timeline. There maybe times when you have weigh too many clips and tracks in your timeline and you want to keep, say Track one through three in the video section always visible and only scroll through tracks four to eight. The same goes for audio. You can easily do this. Let me show you how.
Well, as you can see, we have a Final Cut Pro Project opened here and I got about six video tracks and about six audio tracks. Now, everything fits within the view without a problem so I can move on to here and I can see all of our Tracks 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 without a problem. I do not have to scroll or anything. Now, the only issue though is if I make the tracks a little bigger, then all of a sudden I only get to see basically four tracks of video and four tracks of audio which is okay but if I want to go ahead and do, for example, some editing here in track number 6 but I want to know where actually am I doing to track number 3, I have to continually scroll up and down constantly to make sure that I know what is going on. That is okay but it gets, kind of, annoying after a while.
Now, I could of course do this. I can grab the middle, click on it and drag it down and then I will get to see all of my tracks but now I am hiding a lot of my audio and I like to see some of my audio as well. So, I am going to bring this back to the middle and the way you move it is by just clicking on the middle two bars and then just dragging it in up or down. But there is so much better way of doing that and that is by creating a Static Region within your timeline. A Static Region is just an area where you just freeze your tracks and they do not scroll. They stay there active awhile all other Tracks scrolled.
So, let me show you how to do that. You basically grab the upper thumb tab, right here in the middle, and you can actually drag it up until you cover as many tracks as you want. So, for example, here I am saying I want track 1, 2 and 3 of the video to be static. Then you can drag the bottom thumb tab and drag it to as many audio you want. So, right now I have a Static Region that shows me three tracks of video, three tracks of audio. Now, my other ones will scroll at the top here. So, you can see that I am scrolling to track 6, 5 and 4. So those, I can work with, for example, I can go ahead and do some editing in track 6 here but I know exactly what is going on in tracks 3, 2, and 1 which is what I really want to do. The same thing pertains to the audio for track 1 and 2 but track A3 through A6 are scrollable down here as you can see.
Now, let us say for example you want to actually get rid of one of the audios and one of the video tracks from the static region that is fairly simple to do. Just click on the thumb tab, the bottom thumb tab for the audio, bring it up one and that remove one of the audios. Click on the thumb tab at the top for the video, bring it down once and that removes and then puts Video 3 at the top. So now, this area becomes static and this become scrollable again and D3 and A2 are now part of the scrollable and not static. So, that is fairly easy to do. Now, for example, let us say you want to have more of the audio for viewing; you can grab the slider in the static area, click on it and drag it all the way up and you will get to see more of your audio and you can do the same thing if you want to see more of the video. You can click on it, bring it all the way down and now you get to see more of the scrollable video area but your static area remains the same.
And once you are done using the static area and let us say you do not want to use it anymore, it is really simple to remove all the tracks and bring it back to the way it was. Just grab your thumb tab, bring it all the way up for the audio and then grab your thumb tab, bring it a
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