Two Functions to Rule Them All
The Touch Portal layout that I landed on was born from my most frequently used shortcuts and then reworked over and over as I went through an edit that was already in progress before my bike threw me to the ground. The buttons on the page are all self-explanatory, but I’ll expand on them all below anyway. More importantly, are two functions in particular that have increased my one-handed-editing speed most dramatically.
The first is easy access to the “Replace with Clip” function. I’ve raved about this shortcut before as being essentially a faster way to get media from the project panel into the timeline. It’s smoking fast compared to a 3-point edit and this Touch Portal page puts this power in an easy-to-use button. Combining the Replace with Clip with easy access to Match Frame takes that quickness to another level when pulling multiple shots from the same media source.
The next and arguably most important feature on this Touch Portal page are the modifier buttons, shift, alt, and ctrl. I’ve programmed all of the buttons to be sticky for 5 seconds, meaning that once pressed, they’re active for a full 5 seconds or until they’re pressed again. As seen in the video, the benefits of having easy access to these keys are immense. They’re also able to be used together. For example, if I want to call shortcuts using Excalibur, I can tap alt + ctrl (my Excalibur hotkey combo) plus whatever extra hotkey I need on the keyboard. Or another example is using shift + alt to duplicate a video clip and move it to another video layer, while keeping it from moving forward or backward in the timeline.
Favorites aside, below is a quick breakdown of all the page’s individual buttons.