Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 468)

Chapter 8 Working With Tracks in the Timeline 133
II
Disabling Tracks to Hide Content During Playback
You can disable entire tracks to hide their contents during playback. The clips on a
disabled track are not visible or audible when you play it, nor will they render or be
output to tape.
You can still edit items on disabled tracks; they just won’t appear in the Canvas during
playback. A track can be enabled or disabled at any time. This does not permanently
affect either your sequence or the clips edited into it.
There are several reasons you may want to disable a track:
 A track contains audio that you want to temporarily turn off, while you focus on
other parts of your audio mix.
 A track contains an alternate edit of clips in your sequence that you haven’t yet
committed to using. By editing this alternate sequence into a spare video track, you
can enable and disable it as necessary, to quickly switch between two different
arrangements of clips.
 A track contains effects that you want to temporarily disable, such as superimposed
subtitles. By disabling this track, you can avoid rendering the effects before playing
back your sequence, yet you can still keep them in the Timeline.
You can also enable a single track by disabling all of the other tracks in the sequence.
When Working With Clips on Locked Tracks
Clip items on locked tracks cannot be moved, edited, deleted, or modified in any way.
However, they can still be selected, along with any linked items in other tracks.
The Editing tab of the User Preferences window has an option called “Pen tools can
edit locked item overlays” (to view this window, choose Final Cut Pro > User
Preferences). If this option is selected, you can use the Pen, Delete Point, and Smooth
Point tools to modify the audio levels or opacity of clip items even though they’re on
locked tracks. Clip overlays only control audio levels and video opacity. No other clip
parameters can be changed when a track is locked.