While you're editing your movies, you'll spend most of your time working with Final Cut's Sequence Timeline. By default, the timeline shows you the minimum you need to edit your clips and sound track, but there is a lot more information that can be shown.
The basic timeline looks like this:
Along the bottom of the timeline window are some really small buttons which control the display
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| Timeline Track Height |
This little panel controls the size of the video and audio tracks in the timeline. Selecting the different sized boxes makes the tracks taller or smaller. You can also press the SHIFT and T keys to cycle through the different track height settings.
Clicking the tallest box makes the timeline look like this:
You can zoom into the timeline to focus on a few shots or zoom out to get an overview of the whole sequence. There are few ways to zoom. First, you can use the Zoom Slider control at the bottom of the timeline. Moving the small grey pointer to the right zooms out, showing you more of the edit and moving to the left zooms in to focus on a shorter time period.
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| Zoom Slider |
Zooming in completely lets you see individual frames of video which is really useful if you have an 'orphan' frame left between clips caused by a messy edit. Final Cut draws a dark grey highlight over the time code strip of the timeline representing one frame right next to the play head like this:
The final way you can zoom in and out of the timeline is to use the tags at each end of the window sliding bar at the bottom of the timeline. Pulling the tags apart stretches the sliding bar showing more you more of your edit (zoom out). Pushing them together does the opposite.
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| Window Slider: Use Left and Right Tab to Zoom In and Out |
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