Playing and moving around

Play

Space plays or pauses immediately. Home goes to the start of the project, End to the end.

Playback is composited live in the preview and no encoder runs while it plays. What you are watching is real time, which means it is honest about timing and slightly less than honest about final quality.

Shuttle

J plays backward, K stops the shuttle, L plays forward. Press J or L again for 2x, then 4x, then 8x. This is the fastest way to find a moment in long footage, and it is muscle memory worth building because every editor made in the last thirty years uses the same three keys.

Frame stepping

Left and Right step one frame. Hold Shift and they step one second.

Stepping is how you land a cut precisely. Find it roughly with the shuttle, then step to the exact frame. Do not judge a cut while scrubbing, because your hand speed is not playback speed and the timing will read wrong. Play it at speed before you decide.

In and Out

I sets an In point at the playhead, O sets an Out point. Together they mark a range. Timeline → Clear In and Out removes them, and the toolbar has Clear Marks.

A marked range does three things. It is what Loop uses when nothing is selected. It is what Render Preview renders. And it is what Export exports when you do not want the whole timeline.

Loop

Loop in the transport. It looks for something to loop in a fixed order: selected clips first, then the marked range, then the whole project. So selecting a clip and pressing Loop plays that clip over and over, which is how you judge whether a cut works.

Render Preview and Return to Live Preview

Ordinary Play stays real time and composites on the fly. Render Preview makes an exact quality pass of the marked range and plays that instead, so you see precisely what the export will look like, including every effect at full quality.

It takes as long as it takes, and the queue shows progress. Return to Live Preview switches back.

Use Render Preview when you need to judge quality or check a complicated composite. Use ordinary Play for everything else, because waiting for a render every time you want to check a cut is a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Dropped frames

If the preview reports dropped frames, your machine could not composite fast enough to keep up in real time. It is a preview problem and it has no effect on the export. Lowering the preview resolution fixes it.

Zoom and scroll

Shift+Z fits the whole project on screen. It is also Timeline → Fit Project and View → Fit Project, and it is the first thing to press when you have lost your bearings.

Timeline → Zoom to Selection fills the view with whatever you have selected.

Ctrl and scroll zooms around the playhead. Plain scroll moves across time. Shift and scroll moves up and down through tracks.

Setting position by hand

Drag the ruler or the red playhead. Clicking a clip selects it rather than moving the playhead, which is deliberate, because the two are different intentions.