I've been making AMVs in Adobe Premiere 6.5 for the Mac for the past few years, and decided it's time to upgrade. As I started I went through many tutorials and have successfully converted my dvd footage into an appropriate codec, imported it properly into FCP, etc., etc. But now I'm stuck on one dumb little thing that I can't seem to find the answer to in the stack of manuals that came with FCP 5.
Usually when I'm working on an Avatar Music Video, I work out of order. I'll drop in clips, then polish as I feel the need. It's never been a problem working in Premiere, but when I change the speed of a clip in the timeline in FCP, it ripples the rest of the timeline forward or backward to match the time difference created by the speed change. So for example if I slow down the clip so that it's one second longer, everything after it in the timeline ripples one second forward. As I usually have some editing past that point already done, it knocks it out of sync and I have to go back and re-set all of my editing.
So my question: is there a way to prevent speed changes to a clip from making the remaining timeline footage ripple forward or backward in the timeline? I'm guessing I want some sort of overwrite functionality enabled, but short of doing every edit as a three point edit, I can't figure out how to prevent it. (I don't use three point editing because I'm usually messing around with the speed to see what looks and flows properly, and I tend to make many minute edits in the process.) At worst I can lock the video tracks I'm satisfied with and work in an empty video track, but that's an inconvenient hack.
If anyone can help me out I'd appreciate it. I'm going to pour over the manuals again to see if I can find the missing piece.
Kasra





