Pro Tools Pointers #7
The Option and Control Keys
by Dave Whittaker
SECTIONS:
Summer vacation's over for the Newsletter, and our editor gently reminded me my contribution is overdue, so I looked inside the idea file I keep for this column...and found it was mostly full of cobwebs. Fortunately, I've been working in a facility that's been all-Pro Tools for several years now, so my colleagues provided the tips (or reminded me of tips someone showed me 5 years ago but I had so absorbed them I take them for granted).
You probably know many of the most-used shortcuts that use the Option key, like clearing Solos or Mutes by holding Option down while you click on a Solo or Mute button, or reversing the direction of the Trim tool by holding Option down, but here's a few more that are equally useful, but don't seem to be as well known:
- Holding Option down while dragging the Zoom tool across a region will change the time axis only, while leaving the amplitude unchanged. This is particularly useful when working in reduced track height, when the range of useful amplitude settings is narrower.
- Holding Option down while clicking on the Zoom tool will cause a selection to fill the entire window (very cool).
- This one's a great time-saver: Holding Option down while clicking on any of Display Scale arrows (those amplitude and time axis arrows to the left of the Zoom tool) will return the zoom scaling to it's prior orientation. Subsequent clicks while holding Option down will simply toggle the zoom setting back and forth.
The Control key has a very powerful effect when used with the Grabber--in the jargon from Digidesign it "constrains a region to current selection start". In plain English, that means that when you click on a region with the Grabber while holding down Control, it will move so it's start lines up wherever the insertion point is parked. You can even drag and drop regions from the region list onto the edit window while holding Control down and they will snap right to the insertion point.
When a region is selected, Pro Tools considers the beginning of that region as the insertion point, which means that subsequently clicking with the Grabber on another region while holding down Control will cause the second region to line up with the first. This is extremely useful in several ways. It's a great way to drop multiple regions that must play together at the same point, such as gunshot sweeteners. But it's also a handy way to restore accurate phase relationship to two halves of a stereo pair where one side's region has been inadvertently bumped out of sync with the pair's other side.
Dave Whittaker is currently at Weddington Productions which is now an all-Pro-Tools facility.
He is been working on Pro-Tools for 3 years, ever since mothballing his Moviola.
Thanks to Mike Chock and Marvin Walowitz for help with this column.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 17, No. 4 - Sept/Oct 1996.