I love Media Composer’s keyboard shortscuts.  Why, you might ask?  Well, obviously we all love our keyboard shortcuts, but Media Composers are set up in a weird and wild way that, to be honest, I wouldn’t change for anything.  Believe it or not, there are actually two tools need for setting up your keyboard shortcuts, and in this “In-Depth”, we’ll talk all about keyboard shortcuts, where to find them, and how to update them.  I’ll also give you a brief rundown on mine, and why they’ve served me so well for 25 years.

THE BIG CHOICE

Now, in a way to make things more complicated for editors, when you first choose to create  “New User Profile”, you have three options.  Media Composer, Media Composer Classic, and Transitioning from Premiere Pro.  Two make sense, the other, not so much.  To be honest, I’m going to just ignore “Classic” and say that you really have two choices.  Basic Media Composer, and transitioning from Premiere.  We’ll go with the Media Composer option, give it a name, and jump into the application.

Now, what I find funny is that you get those three options above, when you create your new user, but when you head into the application, into your User Settings (CMD/CTL+SHFT+=), you’ll see that there are a couple of Media Composer keyboard layouts, a Premiere one AND a Resolve one as well.  Very odd.

Anyways, you can switch between them, by simply toggling the checkbox, but we’re going to delete all of them, except for the one that is currently checked, and we’ll use that for our base settings.  Let’s double click and open them up.  Now, we’re greeted by our keyboard layout, that looks like the below.

YOUR ACTUAL KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

Now, something exceptionally important to keep in mind is that in Media Composer, you have your standard keyboard shortcuts, and one “Alt/Additional” set of keys by holding down shift.  That’s it.  Not like in Premiere or Resolve, where you have all the CTL/ALT/SHFT combination of keyboard shortcuts.  One thing you’ll also notice, is that there seems to be no way to add any other keys to your keyboard shortcuts, as there are no options.  That’s where a separate tool called the Command Palette comes into play.  You can use the shortcut of CTL/CMD+3 to get access to it, and you’ll notice right away that you have access to almost every shortcut you could ever want.  Well, almost.

At first glance, it’s pretty simple.  You can either track down the keyboard shortcut you’re looking for, or punch it in the search window, and simply drag and drop it to either your keyboard, or anywhere in the composer window that supports a shortcut being put there (above the timeline or under your composer windows).  If you take a look at the bottom of the Command Palette window, however, you’ll notice two other options at your disposal, that give you even more options.;  I’ll talk about the Menu to Button reassignment toggle first.  It works pretty simple.  Once toggled “On”, you can click on any available command button space in either your keyboard shortcuts, or in the interface, and once you do, simply navigate to any menu in Media Composer, and single click on the menu command you want to assign to a button.  Done.  Pretty quick and pretty simple.  Now, there’s another great feature in the Command Palette that is worth mentioning, and that is the Active palette.  What is that, you ask?  Well, it’s pretty simple.  It’s another toolset available to you all the time.  You can keep the Command Palette open, and simply use is as an additional “keyboard” on screen, and you’ll have access to all the commands available inside of Media Composer.

So, that’s your Keyboard Shortcuts in a nutshell.  So, what are my Keyboard Shortcuts that have gotten me through 25 years of editing?  Well, they’re not as complicated as you might think.

F2- Source Browser (used to be Batch Capture, but when people started asking me what that meant, I changed it.  LOL)
F3- Audio Mixer
F4- Locator(s) (Markers)
F5- Remove Effect
F6- Add Edit
F7- Match Frame
F8- Find Edit
F9- Collapse (Pre-Comp/Nest)
F10- Modify
F11- Title Tool
F12- Fade Effect
SHFT+F2- Render
SHFT+Y- Effects Mode

Believe it or not, that’s it.  You might be wondering why I didn’t have my keyboard stacked with a ton of shortcuts.  You’ll even notice that the Keyboard Shortcuts don’t change any current keyboard settings.  Just the function keys, and a couple of other ones.  Reason being is that I was a freelance editor moving from post house to post house, and I didn’t have a ton of time to sit there rebuilding my keyboard shortcuts all the time and MC support, whenever MC ran into problems, would always suggest resetting your user settings, including your keyboard, so it was something that I didn’t waste a lot of time setting up, if they were going to have to be re-created all the time.  I kept my simple, but effective, to get me up and running at any post house, in little to no time at all.

If you’d like to check out more of my “In-Depth’s” on Media Composer, you can find them here:

Media Composer Project Creation
Avid Attic
Alternating Left And Right Audio

And you can download a 30 day trial of Media Composer at this link.