Quality of life improvements

I make music videos as a hobby, which requires a lot of frame by frame editing to get the music synced up correctly. There are few related things that make it extremely frustrating sometimes. First, the ability to move the audio track above the video track, or the ability to make the tracks taller individually. In order to sync things right I have to be at the maximum zoom level and make the tracks really tall so I can more accurately time things. Doing that means I have to put the preview video on my second monitor, which makes it extremely hard to watch both the timeline and video to check if it’s synced.

Which leads me to the next problem. While I’m trying to find the spot where I need to make a cut, I have to play the clip over and over and over because the playhead is always at the far side of the timeline and the tracks are zooming by so fast that I miss the exact spot because I can’t see it coming until it’s already past the playhead and that takes a lot of time. It would be extremely helpful if there was an option to lock the playhead in place, centered on the timeline while the tracks move past it.

Finally, sometimes it’s impossible to get things synced up right, because a frame/edit is too far or short over the spot on the audio wave form where it needs to be cut. I don’t really even know if that is possible or if the little timer above where the source and project tabs is not actually skipping single frames when I click the little arrows next to it.

The video I linked below took me a long time to make because of those 3 issues I was rambling about. It might give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

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Full screen on my 2nd monitor.
Break out the timeline.
Just drag the timeline to the 2nd monitor.

I actually just discovered I could even separate the timeline by accident like 20 minutes ago. I need to have the timeline and the preview on the same screen so I can watch both to keep an eye on the timing. Now that I know about that though, I can get things adjusted right, so I can make the audio track taller and just scroll to where it’s only showing the audio, which in turn lets me keep the preview video big enough as well. Maybe I’m doing it wrong and making it harder by trying to McGuiver stuff, but it’s got me this far lol.

Now if I could get the playhead to stay still I’d be golden. Thanks.

Edit: Oh now I see what you mean, should have looked at the picture more closely first.

I know what you mean, but it might more trouble than what it’s worth and not sure everyone would really benefit from it. Here is a suggestion I started on this topic.

Just wanted to say thanks again for the tip about fullscreening the preview. Now that I know I can stretch the timeline across 3 monitors the playhead moving all the way to the left isn’t a big deal. Mainly because I need the tracks all the way zoomed in the timeline made it a pain since the it was flying by so fast. So now I have plenty of space to anticipate and get ready to catch the spot I need. I’ve been sitting on 2 minutes of an 8 minute music video for a year and a half because there’s a part in the music that I need to make really fast cuts on. I gave up because I just couldn’t get it timed. Now I’m past that part and I only have 2 minutes left to edit.

Press and hold Shift to skim - scrub/seek using the horizontal position of the mouse cursor without clicking and dragging

You can also use the arrow keys, right or left arrow, one press at a time, or a longer press to get to the desired spot.
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