Group Selection Tool (gg)

Is there any advantage (or hidden power) to using the group selection tool as opposed to marquee selecting with the default selection tool?

I've looked in the documentation and can't figure out what else the group selection does. Or why you would bother using it.

Am I missing something?

Thanks

> Is there any advantage (or hidden power) to using the group selection tool as opposed to
> marquee selecting with the default selection tool?

Yes. Two big ones come to mind.

The Group Selection tool can draw a marquee anywhere on the timeline. Even when the tool is over a clip. When you have a busy timeline, hitting GG is faster than finding a spot that's blank enough for the default Arrow tool to draw a marquee.

Also, Group Selection can be used in an unorthodox way. When selecting or opening a large number of clips one by one, for example to change filter settings, the default Arrow tool is prone to mistakes. If you don't double-click fast enough, you can end up moving a clip that you intended to open, thus changing editing decisions by mistake. Switch to Group Selection and it eliminates the problem. Double-clicking still opens a clip, but Group Selection is incapable of dragging and dropping -- it only highlights and opens. So it's great for selecting many clips in a group, many clips in different clusters, and so on. You can use Group Selection to select the clips, and only switch back to Arrow once all the correct clips are selected.


www.derekmok.com

Excellent points. Thank you.

This is excellent.

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