Ever wonder what these little symbols mean on the left side of your Timeline in Final Cut Pro? It¡¯s called the Timeline Patch Panel, and what it does is it determines which elements from the clip in the Viewer edit to the Timeline. The Patch Panel lets you edit video-only or audio-only into the Timeline and it lets you determine the tracks to which you edit a clip. But it only works when editing clips using the functions such as Insert or Overwrite and dragging them into the Canvas. If you drag a clip directly into the Timeline, you can override the Patch Panel.

The Patch Panel has two sides: the left side, labeled with a lowercase letter, v for video, a for audio, representing the clip in the Viewer. The right side, labeled with an uppercase letter V or A, representing the tracks in the Timeline. The left side of the Patch Panel looks at the clip in the Viewer and only displays the tracks that are there. If there is no audio with a video clip, there won¡¯t be an audio patch on the left. Think of the Patch Panel as showing the source of the clip on the left and the destination of the clip on the right. Keep reading for some examples...

Ok, so let¡¯s suppose you want to edit just the video of a clip from the Viewer into the Timeline. Double-click on the clip to load it into the Viewer. Click on the a1 patch on the left and the a2 patch. You will see a gap between the two sides of the Patch Panel; the gap means the audio will not edit from the Viewer to the Timeline.

Edit your clip and use the Overwrite key (f10). Now just the video edits into the Timeline. Now, if you just want to edit the audio of a clip from the Viewer into the Timeline, click on the v1 patch on the left side. This leaves the gap and now just edits audio to the Timeline.

You can also use the Patch Panel to edit any clip to any track, just by dragging the patches to where you want to target the clips.

One last tip to remember when "patching" is if you ever just want to reset your Patch Panel, there¡¯s a really quick and easy way to do it. Simply right-click in the Timeline Patch Panel and select Reset Panel.

To re-cap, the patches control the vertical position of the media coming into the timeline, whereas in points, out points and the playhead control the position of the media horizontally.