10 Almost New Shortcuts in Premiere Pro (And a Couple of Others)

Wrote this recently because I realized that there are quite a bunch of functions that many users are unaware of.

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www.strypesinpost.com

Excellent! I will link this in next newsletter

Michael Horton
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Thanks, Mike! You will be glad to know the title was inspired by the slogan of an entertainment chain that I saw around LA and Las Vegas.



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Nice one Strypes. I was immediately grateful for the 'option-twirly' shortcut today.

One of the cool things I noticed on the latest release that there's now an option in the export media panel to burn in timecode on the way out, or embed captions, or add a last minute grade using the built-in Lumetri set and a couple of other things. It's a nice quiet little addition.

Yup. I know. I was looking for it for a while as well and didn't realize until someone told me about it. I'm also pretty sure that one came from Premiere's legacy days from before the "Pro" era. I think we used it waaay back in film school.

The LUTs are useful if you're generating proxies and you are shooting in log space. Also there is a toggle for GPU rendering in AME.

The one that blew me away was the Edit Original integration in Premiere. Extremely powerful function especially if you're trying to find an AE project file from a rendered clip. Wish FCP7 had that. Would have saved me quite a lot of time on a project years ago.



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Great work, Strypes! Shortcuts are our friends

This is all great stuff, especially the drag clip to new item trick to instantly match clip and new sequence settings.

I'm still missing two of my FCP favorites, or have they taken care of these too:

1. Shift Z to fit the timeline to the timeline window.

2. Select a clip, then hit X to set in and out points (this works). Then hit something like shift cmd z to fit that to the timeline window. Very useful for FX and compositing.

I'm still fighting with the time remapping function in the effects tab. It's just too small and tweaky-fumbly. And a few other things too (like the scopes) but otherwise Pr has made excellent progress. In my part of the world it is gaining broad use very fast now.

There is a zoom to timeline shortcut. Good thing about that is that when you hit it the first time, it zooms to timeline, but when you hit it the second time, it goes back to the zoom level you were at.

Not too sure about number 2.

For speed changes, I usually use the rate stretch tool. But for variable speed changes, you can do the beziers from the timeline by turning on keyframes, clicking the fx badge and setting that to speed. Then you can grab the keyframes and drag the ends of it to do a smoother ramp... That's a little hard to describe in words, but it's more intuitive than doing it in the ECP.



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Starting with the Pr default keyboard shortcut set: you mean zoom or fit timeline with = or - or backslash keys? None of those work for me, although I'm using an Apple German keyboard. If I remap the zoom to sequence commnad, for example, then it does work.

I've been using the zoom tool to marquee an area to zoom into. Works well enough. Then using the scrollwheel (or shift + scrollwheel, btw works with audio tracks too) to scale open the track(s) to get at the keyframes is great. Wasn't there a command to zoom in and out of the work area? There's nothing listed in the shortcuts editor. That would be a quite useful alternative.

I've been doing speed changes as you are having surrendered my struggle to try and understand the "toggle automatic range rescaling" option and etc. in the effects tab. A search for that particular feature comes up with nothing on the Adobe site so, seems it still needs work.

>I've been doing speed changes as you are having surrendered my struggle to try
>and understand the "toggle automatic range rescaling" option and etc. in the
>effects tab.

Lol. Wanna know what that does to actual retiming? Nothing. Basically, those two numbers next to the line tells you the height of the vertical axis of the velocity graph, and the vertical scale range of the velocity graph. Checking "automatic range rescaling" will allow Premiere to automatically set the height of the graph. Basically, if you spent all day tweaking those parameters, you haven't adjusted anything.. So start by checking "automatic range rescaling, because that's the only way it's useable, and then you need to make keyframes in the ECP, and then adjust where the line is after the keyframe. And yes, it's a bit of a relic.



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In general how are you guys using the shortcuts in Premiere, are you setting them up to be like FCP7 or learning the Premiere way?

I really like how FCP7 sets up their tools Ripple, Roll, etc... so it's just r, rr, rrr...

Learning the Premiere way, quite used to it now. It takes a little effort at first, but after a job or two you'll be fine. Its all very similar. Just different. But I think down the road the better choice as Premiere continues to improve in leaps and bounds whereas FCP7, sadly, is history.

I have to admit to using the FCP keys. Which is bad and wrong, and something I counseled people against for years when switching from Avid to FCP. It's just that when you have to get work out quick, its so easy to let your muscle memory do the walking.

But I'm with Clay in thinking that they're not going to include this keyset forever, so if you've got the time it would be lots better to learn the Premiere set.

And I hereby solemnly swear to make myself a modified keyset that includes at least a few of the major Premiere shortcuts so I can move over too.

I use a modified set of FCP keys. I actually don't think you need to relearn the entire set of keys, since a lot of the basic editing functions are similar. However, I do advise paying attention to many of the keys in Premiere add them because those are mighty useful. I do find the trimming quite similar to Avid, which makes trimming really fast once you get a hang of it. You can also trim like you do in FCP, but that would be a waste of a fantastic feature set.



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