View and Listen

Figure A.5: Menu pulldowns at the top with Transport buttons below. Note the colored tooltips too.

1. On the second line, below the pulldowns, are transport buttons to move back and forth on the timeline and play forward or reverse, fast or slow, or a single frame. When you mouse over one of these buttons, a colored tooltip appears to tell you its function along with a key shortcut inside of parenthesis. When you left click the mouse on the transport button it starts the play and click again to stop it. As you use these buttons, watch the Compositor to watch your video.
2. On the timeline, you only see thumbnails and not every single picture. You may want to use your keyboard’s down arrow to expand the thumbnails and the up arrow to unexpand them – on United States keyboard, the arrow keys are generally together on the lower right hand side of the keyboard, a little to the right of the space bar. This is a more cpu intensive operation and for very large video can be time-consuming.

If you need more detailed information on a button or other particular GUI element than is shown in the tooltip, press Alt/h hotkey and the HTML page in your configured web browser will display the documentation for the item currently under the mouse.