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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

Making track height bigger & smaller in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to deal with track heights. It's these things, these are tracks, these are how high they are. There's a couple of different shortcuts, you need to decide, out of the many that I'm going to show you, which works for you, because nobody likes doing this, up a little bit, make this one up a little bit, and this one's up, and what's even happening to the audio down here. All right, let me show you the shortcuts. 

The first one, probably easiest one is, make sure that your Timeline is selected, otherwise the shortcut doesn't work. Hold down 'Command' on a Mac, 'Ctrl' on a PC, and hit the ‘ -/+ ‘ key. It's up on the top right, so try and find that. ' + ' zooms in, and ' - ' zooms out, there you go. If you want to do it for the audio as well, hold the 'Option' key on a Mac, the 'Alt' key on a PC, and it zooms in and zooms out. Where's the top of mine, there it is. 

So for me, if you're not super advanced, those will do, but if you're not a shortcut person, you can just double click on this, like random gray area, it does lots of stuff, this random gray here. We're going to look at this later on, but like random gray area, double click it, full, double click it again, small, double click, full, double click, small, there's a way of just getting them bigger and smaller, without remembering shortcuts. You might not like them, so just double click this area, big, small. 

So we've learned 'Command +' zooms in the video, 'Option +' zooms in on the audio, but if you hold 'Shift', what does that do? Ah, it goes all in, it goes full song, it goes, 'Shift +' goes all, everybody big, and ' - ' goes everybody small. That might be the one shortcut that you circle and write down, and go, that's the one, that's all I need, full in, holding 'Shift', Mac or PC, and hit ' + ' or ' - ', full in, full out, so many shortcuts. 

Incidentally they're all hidden in here, see this little wrench, maximize all, minimize all, I already have minimized, didn't I? That's what that does, say, same shortcut, 'Shift +' or ' - ', really they don't show you the shortcuts in here, but hey, you know them now. You say, hey, I don't want them all to do stuff, I want an individual, like, I like my, say A-roll here to be like nice and big, and my B-roll to be big, half the size, because it's not as important. I'm going to hit the Tilde, '~' key, so I can see it a bit more, and let's say that you want this, generally ends up being kind of like graphics and stuff. So you end up keeping it teeny tiny, and you end up with this, like lovely, background music, ends up getting small. You get it perfectly, you're like, "Oh". 

Imagine if I could go back to that every time, on every project, you can. So once you get it, well you want to adjust the heights and then go into the little wrench again. You can save a preset, give it a name. So this is going to be 'Dan's Unicorn Timeline Height, Going to give it a shortcut. This is where it gets a little bit weird. You say, I'm going to set it to track height preset one, perfect. 

Now what's the shortcut? I will show you. So you save it, and the long way is you end up adjusting it, and moving it around, or you start a new project, you can go manually, just into the wrench and say, actually, let's go and find, there it is there, Dan's Unicorn Preset Height, you might just use that, but shortcut people, you might have two or three different ones, so you can save a second one, not the Unicorn one. There might be, I don't know, working on laptop one, working on dual monitor version, a couple of different ones, but how does that shortcut work, what was it called? Hang on right there, wrong one, wrong bit, 'Manage Presets', I set it to Track Height Preset 1', that's the thing you need to remember, Track Height Preset, I can do that. 

So now go to your shortcuts, remember, it's under 'Edit' on a PC, 'Premiere Pro' here on a Mac, and over here type in, what was it, 'Track Height Preset 1’, then you connect it. So I'm going to double click it, I'm going to click in this random area over here, and come up with my shortcut. You're trying to find ones that aren't used, 'Command 1', weirdly is not used, on Mac, 'Ctrl 1', give it a test, on a PC, it's probably not used, if it is, try your number keypad, come up with some other random one. If there is a conflict, decide if you're ever going to use it again, that's how you assign those shortcuts. 

Kind of a convoluted way, in my opinion, but hey ho, we're done. So working on a project, and using my shortcuts, let's 'Shift -' all in, I'm doing some stuff, and then I can go 'Command 1', back to the heights that I love. 

All right, that's probably enough for track heights. How long is this video? There's a lot to do with track heights, it's important. You've all done it, you've all probably been very annoyed by doing this, and getting it right, and then either shortcutting it, or not seeing the thumbnails, yeah, you understand, I know you do. All right, that's enough for track heights, let's get on to the next video.