CS6 Move Clips Vertically

I'm missing this one: alt+up arrow or down arrow to move a clip or selection of clips up or down while maintaining their horizontal position in the timeline. Also shift drag clip or clips up or down in the timeline to jump over other clips that might be in the way and still maintain position.

The only work-around I've figured out is to park the playhead with snapping on at heads and then drag clip or selection. Works. But when doing a lot of compositing, a keyboard shortcut method is faster as well as safer, i.e. I can be sure that nothing has slipped out of position.

Or is there another way?

Meantime, yep, put in a feature request.

Correct me if i'm wrong, as I'm not at my computer, but I dont think you have to move the playhead to enable snapping at head. With snapping on, it snaps when you shift a clip up/down.

Yea, I filled in a feature request for that already. Also, shifting clips around in Premiere isn't as intuitive as in FCP, where if you shift the video clip up a track, the linked audio will shift down 2 tracks.



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Agree, but I find that 98% of the time if you just drag the clip upwards it stays frame perfect anyway. I still have the habit of holding shift while doing it, which I think tries to invoke grabbing multiple clips and never works. Anyway try just dragging up. Like the razor tool that doesn't show a snap line, it still actually cuts at the playhead, but you don't feel secure that it's going to work out alright until after it's done it.

Yeah sure, like the blade it basically works most of the time, but I still hope that they add a few keyboard shortcuts just to make compositing more quick and more precise. When mastering, 98% of the time isn't enough. CS6 is otherwise an excellent compositor, it just needs a few more simple commands and functions to make it perfect.

Like, is there a shortcut to resize the current selection (like a stack of composited clips) to the width of the timeline? I think that it was alt+z in FCP (as opposed to shft+z to resize the entire sequence). That's another one I used constantly in FCP and miss in PPro. Or, with a clip opened in the effects tab, shft+i to jump to the head of a clip, shft+o to jump to the tail. And that half a keyframe diamond icon at heads and tails is really hard to see. Just a lot of little stuff that would make life easier.

Meantime, I'm having a lot of difficulty with the variable speed effect (either in the timeline or the effects tab). It is not especially intuitive, and like in FCP, the controls are too small and fumbly for precise control (I'm probably dreaming but imagine having a nice BIG graph pop-up like in other compositors). So far I haven't found the definitive tutorial that explains it very well. Any luck with this?

Totally agree Clay. A lot of niggly little things that could be improved, although the overall experience is good. I know for sure that they are listening though, so do put in feature requests.

I took some time to learn a lot of the PP shortcuts, but then I started work at a post house that almost always has the work stations set to use the FCP7 shortcuts, and you can modify on top to get the keyboard working the way you want it to. Mostly!

My recent personal peeve is having to zoom in so far to select a transition because of the overlarge red arrow.

I liked some of the ol' FCP shortcuts that aren't in Premiere Pro. Moving a clip up a track seems to be a very popular one for those switching from FCP to Premiere Pro. It's funny 'cause that feature didn't even come in to FCP until a number of versions. Now it's the one that is missed most.

If you guys have recommendations, you can make a feature request: [www.adobe.com]
Your feedback is welcome.

I've been filling those in almost everytime I work on PPro on a job, as I almost always come across bugs of one kind or another. So far no show stoppers, and the kernel panics with OpenCL seemed to have stopped on the 6.0.2/ML update.

Option up/down to shift clips is useful, but how do Adobe feature requests work? I bet right now, with legacy FCP users making the switch, there are loads of feature requests from people who are trying to work in PPro like they worked in FCP. Then you have existing users, eg. people who are able to use PPro for their projects. Then there are the non-users - people who are reluctant to use PPro because of certain glaring shortcomings- and non-users won't fill in feature requests, because they don't use it. I love PPro. It's great for the short jobs that I do at home, but as an NLE for post houses who do long form work even occasionally, will have to start weighing the pros and cons.

Media management (offline/online re-linking, batch reconnection to multiple folders, search for media, consolidate/transcode, etc) is top on my list, also other features such as offline/online workflow, auto patching and a less klutzy way of patching tracks, the swap edit "bug" (great feature, why handicap it?), better multicam UI and tools, a better search tool and database functionality, and an asset management tool (Adobe Bridge is unusable for video use). And for collaborative editing, you can't open 2 projects simultaneously, you can't share bins. Markers suck. Most of these are deal breakers for long form work. I'm just hoping we don't see an FCP 8 with the next PPro release, but just a better modern NLE that is finally able to tackle even the most arduous of edit projects.



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