Video: Keyboard Focus I in Digidesign Pro Tools March 12, 2008
Posted by ConnorSmith in : Digidesign, Pro Tools, Videos , trackbackThis is the first video in a series of videos on Pro Tool’s keyboard focus. This is the fastest way to edit in Pro Tools, and anyone using Pro Tools will benefit greatly from learning these skils. In this video, I cover zooming, creating fades, trimming regions, and nudging.
For the record, this is Pro Tools 7.4cs2 running on Leopard 10.5.1
Transcript:
This is The Studio Files .com video on keyboard focus in Pro Tools LE. Now there are going to be more videos on keyboard focus, but for now we are just going to cover the basics. First you need to make sure that your keyboard focus button is enabled. And that is this button [at the top of the edit window]. If it is outlined in Blue, then its on, if its not, then its off, so make sure its outlined in blue. What keyboard focus basically does, is that it takes all your key commands that would require modifier keys (like control, option, or command, apple, etc…), and it makes it so that you don’t have to use those. It’s very fast and very efficient. First lets talk about zooming. One way to zoom is to just hit F5, which will turn on your zoom tool. Then, you just click and drag to where you want to zoom, and Pro Tools will zoom in. With keyboard focus, there are a couple different ways to zoom. Today, we are just going to talk about “R” and “T”. If you hit the R key, you will zoom out. If you hit the T key, you will zoom in. Firs,t let zoom out with the R key. And, we will zoom in with the T key. It’s pretty simple. Those keys are placed very conveniently on the keyboard, so that its very easy to do zooms with those. You will probably find yourself using those a lot. Let’s zoom out with the R key. Let’s talk about the fade and trim tools. Those are keys A-G on your keyboard. Lets zoom into a new region, this time I am going to use the F5 zoom tool. Now, the A key will trim everything before your cursor. So, if I put my cursor here, and hit the A key, notice that everything before my cursor was deleted. Now let’s UNDO that with just the Z key. One more time, the A key, trims everything before the insertion point. Let’s undo that, and talk about the S key. Its the same thing, just opposite. It will trim everything after your cursor. So, hit S, and notice everything is trimmed. Undo it with Z, put the cursor somewhere else, and hit S again. Let’s zoom out with the R key. This time lets zoom in with the T key. This is a new region. Let’s talk about D, F, and G keys. D is similar to A, but rather than trimming everything before your cursor, it writes a fade in. Watch what happens when I hit the D key. Notice that big fade is drawn in. Let’s undo that with Z, and skip to the G key. The G key is very much like the S key, but it fades out rather than trims (so everything after your cursor is going to fade out). Let’s undo that, put the cursor somewhere else, and show you one more time. Now finally, lets talk about the F key. First, we are going to zoom out one more time with R. Now lets switch to the grabber tool. (We are going to have another video soon on tools in Pro Tools, but for now, just switch to the grabber tool with F8). Let’s grab this region over here and drag it onto the region we were just looking at. Now let’s pretend that this is an edit that I need to fade. Zoom in with F5. You are going to want to make a crossfade on that edit point. Switch back to the selection tool with F7, and highlight the part where the regions overlap, and hit the F key. You’ll see that Pro Tools writes a fade for you. Now, the F key also works for fade-ins and fade outs. If you highlight to the end of a region and hit F, it will fade out, and if you do the same to the beginning of a region, it will fade in. Let’s talk about one more technique here, because all of these techniques are going to be used in the updated drum editing video which will be posted soon. I will show you know to nudge with the comma and period keys. First, check your nudge amount. If you click that menu, notice there are a few options. I usually start with 100 samples (1000 is way too large, and 10 is way too small). To make edits, highlight what you want and seperate with the B key. If you hit the B key, a new region is separated and created. Notice that if you UNDO it, the region goes away. Once you separate a region, you can nudge it forward and backwards with the comma and period keys. (Notice how the audio moves 100 samples each time, which is our nudge amount). So, those are the basics. We’ll talk later about some more advanced functions of keyboard focus. But, now you have the required skills for our drum editing video, which is coming up next.
C
The Studio Files
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