Pro Tools Tip - Focus Keys

After Avid bought Digidesign, the company phased out its Audiovision and began incorporating some of that program’s features into Pro Tools. One of these is the Commands Key Focus, which when active, allows users to perform various editing functions by pressing a single key. Commands Key Focus, also known as “focus keys,” became part of Pro Tools starting with Version 5.0.

Unlike the regular edit commands in Pro Tools, focus keys are not context sensitive. Other editing commands vary depending on how you are viewing your tracks in the Edit Window.



Figure 1. The “a…z” button turns the Focus Keys function on and off.

Pro Tools has four distinct modes for looking at tracks: Waveform, Block, Volume and Mute. A fifth mode, Panning, is also available if a track is routed to a stereo output, and still others are created if you are using Plug-in automation. Each of these has its own set of editing commands, which may not appear in other modes. For instance, if you are viewing Waveforms or Blocks, region editing is possible; otherwise, those edit commands will be used for something else.

But focus keys are ‘hardwired’ to specific editing functions, so that no matter how you view your tracks, they will always do the same thing. The idea behind this was that it would make Pro Tools feel more hardware-like, and newer versions of the program are even shipped with colored stickers that users can put on their keys.

Two focus keys that I constantly use enable you to trim the head and tail of a region. Pressing “A” will trim the head of a region or regions, from wherever the cursor is located, and “S” will do the same for the tail of the region. Once I saw these two keys in use, I vowed to learn as many focus keys as I could! Three others that come in very handy are “D,” which creates a head fade, “F,” which creates a cross-fade and “G,” which creates a tail fade.

To make the focus keys active, you have to enable Commands Key Focus by clicking the “a…z” button in the upper left of the Edit window (see Figure 1). You can also temporarily activate a focus key by holding down Control as you press the key.

If you learn the focus keys, you can set up your tracks as you normally do, then when mixing, spend most of your time in the Volume track view. By using the focus keys, you have basically doubled the number of key commands available. You still have all the traditional commands, which will now be directed to automation editing. But through the use of focus keys, you can also do region editing. In practice, this means that you can trim the heads and tails of clips without having to switch the View setting back and forth.

If you are using a video capture card to do QuickTime movie playback on your Pro Tools system, you can make the onscreen picture window (the one on the Mac’s screen) much smaller. To do so, you’ll need Quicktime Player Pro, but its $35 price is well-worth the on-screen real estate. (It’s available online from Apple.)

Figure 2. Session Browser’s ‘Varispeed Session Options’ window
allows you to change the speed and format of your session
while maintaining all edits.

Start by opening your movie in QuickTime Player Pro. Press Command-I to bring up the Get Info menu, then set the Movie pop-up menu to “Video Track.” Next, use the Function pop-up to select “Size.” A new dialog box will appear, and you will be able to reduce the size. I usually take it down to about 18x35 pixels (quite small). Hit Save.

When the movie is loaded into Pro Tools, you will have a very tiny “windoid” for the movie on your computer monitor, but on your video playback monitor you will still get the normal, full-screen image.

Digidesign and Aurora have announced the availability of an updated Fuse driver that will deliver better playback of digital picture on most Macs. Until now, it seemed that the combination of Pro Tools 5.1 and the Fuse card caused strain on the Mac CPU, which led to stuttering at periodic intervals. Ironically, the problem seemed most pronounced on newer G4s. The new driver can be downloaded at both www.digidesign.com and www.auroravideosys.com.

In my last article, I briefly mentioned Session Browser, a program from Gallery Software that “resolves” Pro Tools sessions, finding and restoring lost files. I am a huge fan of this program and consider it a must-have.

Unfortunately, Session Browser has not been compatible with Pro Tools 5.1, but the soon-to-be-released Version 2.0 will remedy that. This new version also introduces an archiving feature that will preserve folder arrangements (especially handy if you have files named “Audio-1” in more than one directory).

While ProTools 5.1 has some nice new functions for finding missing and lost audio, they pale next to the speed and efficiency of Session Browser. It is almost completely automated, asking for user input only as a last resort. Other great features are the program’s ability to convert a session to different timecode rates, as well as to do pull-ups and pull-downs of sessions and their associated audio (see Figure 2).