Watching a cut
Full screen playback on ⌘F — the whole screen, still playing, with every key still working. The same frame when you come back.
Press ⌘F and the cut fills the screen. Press it again, or Escape, and you are back where you were, on the same frame.
This is Avid's Shift-Cmd-F and it does what you expect it to do. What is worth knowing is what keeps working while it is up, because that is the difference between a preview and a way of actually working:
- Everything plays. J K L, space, the arrows — all of it. Sound carries on.
- You can still cut. Marks, splices, lifts: the keyboard is the keyboard. Somebody watching over your shoulder says "lose that bit" and you can lose it without coming back out.
- It is the same playback. Not a separate player — it is your record monitor, made bigger. So the frame you were parked on is the frame you see, there is nothing to load, and when you come back out nothing has moved.
- The framing is right. The picture letterboxes into the screen at its own shape. A 16:9 cut on a 16:10 display gets black top and bottom rather than a stretched picture.
The cursor disappears once it is up, and comes back when you move the mouse.
When somebody is in the room
This is the one command worth handing to a producer: "press ⌘F". It is in the Display menu as Full Screen Playback too, so you can point at it rather than spell out a shortcut.
Two things that go with it:
Captions. If the cut has captions and you have them on, they are on screen here too — they are drawn over the picture, not around it, so a screening shows what the viewer would see.
A second monitor. Display → Open Second Monitor… is the other half of this: it puts the record monitor in its own window, which you can drag to a television and leave there while you keep cutting on the first screen. Full screen is for watching; a second monitor is for having something to look at all day.
If nothing happens
A browser can refuse to go full screen — Safari wants the click or key to be yours rather than something a script asked for, and a page inside a frame needs to be allowed to. If it is refused, B/side says so rather than leaving you pressing the key again.