I recently purchased Keybaord Maestro and I've been building macros, I'm working as hard as I can at being lazy and it's great. I've been looking for inspiration from prebuilt macros and I haven't been seeing a lot of ones on the forum for apps I use. Does anyone want to share?
The apps I use daily use are: Brave Browser, Spotify, Alfred (Hundreds of times daily), Hazel, Discord, Apple Notes, Microsoft To Do, Apple Calendar, Quicktime/IINA, CustomShortcuts, Karabiner Elements, EQMac, Todoist (sometimes), Streamdeck, Dropzone 4, Apple Motion, Moom/Magnet, CommandPost, Numbers, Pages, Bartender 4, Script Editor/Xcode, Stickies, Bear(a notes app), Apple Podcasts, Apple Music(The app not the service, why can't it still be called iTunes!!) Minecraft, Fantastical(learning) iStat Menus, USB Overdrive, Pixelmator Pro and Final Cut Pro. There's more but I'll stop there, can you tell I'm a power user? Yes, I use these apps every day!
Furthermore if anyone has any recommendations for apps that work well with keyboard maestro I'd be very interested - As you can tell I don't have enough - No, really I need more!
I use Keyboard Maestro extensively with Final Cut Pro and have many macros. But one of the difficulties with simply sharing them (and ironically this is Keyboard Maestro's main strength) is that they relate to stuff I do or ways I like doing things so, they wouldn't necessarily solve the things you want to solve.
But as a starting point - one of the simplest uses of Keyboard Maestro in Final Cut Pro is to remap menu items and tasks to shortcut keys that make more sense to me. And to make tasks that might normally require two menu choices or more, into single Macros that have a single hot key to launch them. I have all my Final Cut Pro Macros in a Group Palette with Icons that help me find them quickly if I forget their hot keys. And I have a hot key that shows/hides this Palette.
A lot of these are simple remapping of hot keys, using Keyboard Maestro's Action "Show Menu Item".
And the reason I remap these keys using Keyboard Maestro rather than changing them from within Final Cut Pro is that Keyboard Maestro syncs between all my Macs - so, my preferred hot keys for Final Cut Pro are instantly there on any of my Macs I am working on.
And as an example of a simple multi-step Macro the one called "Volume -5dB Relative" drops the relative volume of a selected clip or multiple selected clips by -5dB
The reason I have this Macro is that this is a task I do a lot. It's probably not something you would want to do (although hopefully you can see the idea in the screenshot and that can inspire your own Macros.)
Generally, the best way to learn and use Keyboard Maestro is to automate tasks that you have to do more than a few times and which would be quicker if they were automated or at least reduced to a single key press instead of several key presses and mouse clicks.
Think of the things you do in Final Cut Pro that you find laborious and see if you can use Keyboard Maestro to automate those tasks. And when you get stuck ask the Forum for help
I'm in the same situation as @Zabobon - the things I do in FCP are generally specific to my workflow.
And I have a lot of macros that manipulate the UI, that require JXA scripting. The problem with sharing these macros is if Apple makes some big design change to the UI, they'll probably break. If that were to happen, it would take me a while to get them working again. But it would only be me that is waiting for the fix. If I shared the macros and they broke, other people would be begging for a fix, and I don't want that kind of pressure (I'm retired now - I don't need that, uh, "stuff" anymore).
So the best I can offer is to answer questions. Other than that, here's my philosophy: "Laziness promotes productivity." Which means, if I have to do something over and over again, and I get tired of doing it, I spend time to automate it. So like I said, when you have a task you do a lot, that's something you might want to try and automate.
I made this macro yesterday - It will detach audio + delete it from the footage. If you have any suggestions on improving it I'd appreciate that. I've not done much editing since I made these macros I sorta burned my entire day yesterday learning new software... I'm pretty sure this macro won't properly work when there's 3 clips stacked atop each other. This is rare and I could remember what I need to do for this macro but it would be better if it just worked. Anyway..
I re mapped my most frequently used shortcuts to be right below my left hand so E = Command + B. I forget whether Option + Command + B is in the default list - I changed a few shortcuts when I first got Final Cut Pro because I came from iMovie and at the time I was so overwhelmed by Final Cut Pro I didn't want to re learn a few shortcuts (lol) I use detach audio here because I edit gameplay footage and it doesn't matter if the audio is gone from the footage, most of the time I detach it entirely instead of making a billion little cuts in the footage unnecessarily (since it's basically voiceover). I could have it mute the clip instead of detach audio but that would probably cause problems if I change audio of all the timeline.
I'm not new to macros, just Keyboard Maestro. I've been using macros with my Stream Deck for months - & I've dabbled in Applescript with Pixelmator Pro. If you're an editor and never plan on streaming in your life still - GET A STREAMDECK!
Are you able to export your macro list & share it here so I can modify it to my needs? I find a starting point always helpful - Our shortcuts might not be commonly used but I might be able to shift some of mine over to ones you use because your layout is probably more optimized than mine because I only started optimizing my shortcut layout a few days ago. I wanted to wait to do that because I wanted to know most of the keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro first. I can proudly say that I know all of the ones I'd ever use and some more besides. And now I have to re memorize a lot of them because I'm changing from the defaults! But I find it helpful to know the defaults to know what people are referring to if they only list a shortcut without context.
I've learned that with editing - People don't see the point of making something that takes 5 seconds take 2.5 seconds because "It's just 2.5 seconds" but if you do that 100 times in an edit that saves 250 seconds and if you are able to do that with everything you do when editing that cuts the editing time in half - Which is HUGE for editing.
A good tip is to try to use Menu Selections rather that simulating keystrokes - it's usually a lot more robust. So, your above example to Detach and Delete Audio from a Selected Clip could be simplified to:
