what are your hot key preferences?

Dominated wrote on 8/11/2009, 4:51 AM

At my day job I use AVID Media composer and I find that I have had to meld the two programs somewhat together or I just end up pressing buttons that take me nowhere on my timeline. Does anyone here customize their Keyboard to suit your work flow and if so what are some of the modifications you have made . My big one and it may seem silly is I took the ability to drop my media from my trimmer away from the A button and moved it to the B button that way it is close to the JKL and the (I) (o) buttons. BTW I find Vegas (even with its problems and it has a few) to be superior to avid MC. In MC if you click on a sequence to add to the player side while playing the piece you are editing everything stops and while you capture video the machine is locked and you have to wait until it is finished before you can start to edit.

Comments

[r]Evolution wrote on 8/11/2009, 8:58 AM

"In MC if you click on a sequence to add to the player side while playing the piece you are editing everything stops..."
This is true for FCP & Premiere too. I hate that. I want it to Stop only when I tell it to Stop.

"Does anyone here customize their Keyboard to suit your work flow."
Since I also use most all the other NLE's I tend NOT to use many Keyboard Shortcuts but rely more-so on the File>Edit>Menu structure. Besides the JKL & IO most other Keyboard Shortcuts are so different that it's way too confusing to try and remember which NLE you're in and what the Shortcuts are... but the File>Edit>Menu structure tends to be fairly similar. Some things are labeled differently but they are usually in the same place.

"At my day job I use AVID Media composer..."
In my experience this makes you more marketable and able to demand a higher wage than a Vegas editor. The few jobs that I've seen posted for a Vegas editor were at little Mom & Pop shops that couldn't pay me a decent wage if they wanted to. Some others require you to have your own NLE and by asking for a Vegas editor they are saying to me, "Low Pay."

If you're solid working where you are maybe you should start talking about Vegas. Maybe get a Cheap Workstation setup running Vegas and let them see its power. They could have 5-6 Seats of Vegas for the price of 1 Avid... you just grew your business 500%! (provided you have the work that warrants it)

If you really wanted you could map your Vegas Keyboard Shortcuts to match your Avid... but as you're aware, they are 2 totally different beasts so this may not work out as planned when editing.

I'm a pretty solid 3Point Editor so I tend to like the way Avid, FCP, & Premiere edit as apposed to Vegas' way... but I like the SMOOTHNESS of Vegas; it simply can't be beat. [i](I haven't tried the new FCP7 yet)

Chienworks wrote on 8/11/2009, 9:08 AM

I suppose i'm an odd duck. I like to use software almost completely the way it came "out of the box". Here's a complete list of the modifications i do to a Vegas install:

- Turn off automatically open last project at startup (i think this is the single biggest improvement anyone can make).
- Move the timeline back to the top.
- Disable the new theme colors.
- Disable XP theme support.
- Remove the three default audio plugins from the track header (not that i care about them being there, but they leave the plugin indicator green, which signals "on" in my mind and then it's hard to know which tracks i've added effects to).

And that's it. Note that the middle three items merely make Vegas look the way it used to in previous versions rather than altering the work flow in any way. The thing i like about this is that everything matches the manual and help screens and i don't have to remember what's different.