Tip #19Kinesense LE

Kinesense keyboard shortcuts for playback and the timeline

Play, step, change speed and direction, jump between events and zoom the timeline from the keyboard, and remap any shortcut or jog shuttle button.

Patricia McCabeSoftware Engineer

This time we’re going to cover some of the shortcuts you can use to speed up your Kinesense experience. Some of these even I didn’t know about!

Playback Shortcuts

Most of the shortcuts in Kinesense are around the playback functionality. The obvious ones are the spacebar for playing and pausing playback and using the arrow keys to step through the video frame by frame. If you want to use Play Events Only press P. Navigating from event to event uses the Page Up and Page Down buttons.

You can also change the speed and direction of playback. E increases the speed of playback and W decreases it. Get the playback speed back to normal using Q. Changing the direction of playback can be done with the [ ] keys or by pressing Backspace. Backspace will just change the current direction of playback.

Zooming in and out of the timeline can also be done through shortcuts. X lets you instantly zoom out of the entire timeline so you don’t need to keep zooming out. Also if you highlight a section of the timeline as if you were adding a clip and hit Z, Kinesense will zoom in on that area you’ve just selected. How handy is that!

Editing Shortcuts

Of course there are a load more shortcuts and you can find a full list of them in the Settings Editor under the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.

The Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Settings Editor, listing each command and its key.

As with everything else in the Settings Editor these can be changed. By selecting the edit button Edit shortcut button a box will pop up with the current shortcut.

The shortcut dialog for Forensic - NextSprite, set to PageUp.

Hit the new key, or key combo, that to wish to use and then click save. When you’ve finished editing all the shortcuts you want click Save at the bottom of the screen and restart Kinesense.

And if you happen to have a jog shuttle controller (popular with video editing gurus) you can map the joggy buttons directly to the Kinesense keyboard shortcuts.

A jog shuttle controller used for video editing.

Happy shortcutting!

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