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By Steve Cohen The Meridien Media Composer inaugurated a new feature that many Guild members may not yet have discovered — contextual menus. These quickly accessed commands, borrowed from the Windows user interface, provide convenient shortcuts to many commonly used functions and are available throughout the application. The reason they’ve remained largely out
of sight is that on Mac systems they’re invoked with an unusual
key combination. On Windows machines, a right click is all that’s
necessary to bring up a contextual menu, and in a typical Mac application,
a control-click does the same thing. But in the Mac Media Composer,
contextual menus are invoked with control-shift-click — if
you hold down the control and shift keys and click anywhere in the
program a menu full of useful shortcuts will appear. In the Timeline:
In the Source/Record monitor (the Composer window):
In the Project window with the Bins tab selected:
In a bin when a clip is selected:
In a bin when nothing is selected:
Many other menus are available. Try control-shift-clicking in other windows to see them. With a different keyboard shortcut, you can display numerical information about a shot or sequence, in a single consolidated window. To do this, hold down the command and option keys and click on a clip — or simply click and hold. You’ll see a window like the following, which contains all the information available for that clip. Here’s what happens when you command-option click on a subclip (in this case, in text view):
Command-control-click produces a slightly different window, where all database fields are shown, even when no information has been entered into them. Contextual menus can be very useful because they allow you to work more quickly and avoid long reaches up to the menu bar. They do much the same thing as keyboard shortcuts, but they’re more intuitive because they require no memorization. Even if you only use them for a few oft-repeated commands, they might become an essential part of your editing toolkit.
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