This info was in a newsletter last August but was never included on the site. More and more people are working on laptops so I know this will be super useful for someone out there. Also KB Covers sells laptop keyboard covers with the shortcuts printed on them. I bought one of their plain covers and it does an awesome job of keeping the cat hair out of the keyboard, but it's warping in the middle after just a month of use. Must be the heat. Alright, back to the topic at hand.

Keyboard shortcuts can save you loads of time and it's good practice to work them into your workflow. But, what if you work on a laptop and don't have access to a lot of the shortcuts? They are there, you just have to know where to look!

Here are a few MacBook Pro shortcuts to get you started.

• Ram Preview: fn + m
• Audio only preview: fn + >
• Add a marker on the fly: fn + p
• Rotate 1° CCW: fn + ; (semi-colon) For 10°, hold down shift.
• Scale 1% smaller: fn + opt + ; (semi-colon)
• Grid: fn + opt + ' (apostrophe)
• Forward one frame : fn +page up (add shift for 10 frames)
• Back one frame: fn + page down
• Jump to first frame: fn + home
• Jump to last frame: fn + nd

Jim Kanter, Toolfarm Forum Expert, was in a thread about this recently on the AE-List and adds this great tip for MacBook Pro users: In System Preferences, under Keyboard, be sure to change the settings so that the F keys handle software control and you have to press the Fn key to activate hardware changes (mute, volume, etc.).

If you know any others, please email me or post to our forum.

While we're talking about shortcuts, Jonas Hummelstrand's blog has a nice article on Using AE Shortcuts with a non-English Keyboard.

Jeff Almasol has posted Additional Scripts for After Effects CS3 at the Adobe Exchange that allows you to edit keyboard shortcuts in AE, among other things.

Labels: After Effects