Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Shortcuts to speed up editing in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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All right, this video is about speeding up your workflow, with a few extra shortcuts. I've got some that are appropriate for us now. We're going to learn a few more throughout the course. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but I'm going to put all the shortcuts and tips into one video, right at the end of the course, just so you've got one place. There'll also be a PDF that are in the exercise files for all the shortcuts, in one little place, but for now let's look at, the ones that are appropriate for us, right at this second. 

So the first one, and probably the most useful one is going to be the back slash ' \ ', now back slash key is a tough one. It's the back slash, not the forward slash, that does something different. So we're looking for that key. It's all over the place on different keyboards around the world. Hunt it out on your keyboard, and what it does is if I'm zoomed in, on my Timeline, so I've got my little blue box around it, I've got it clicked, hit ' \ ', look at that, just zooms out the Timeline so I can see it all; super handy. 

Instead of trying to do this, or the old minus, minus, minus, too far, zoom in 1, zoom out 1, huh. Hit ' \ ' and it just kind of fits it all into the windows, can see everything. Watch this, if I delete all this and hit ' \ ', it fits all of this in with a bit of space to drag a new footage on. Super handy; I've undone it so there it is, ' \ ' again, zooms out. I still got room to stick stuff at the back here; awesome. You can toggle it as well, so watch this, if I'm zoomed in real close to this - I really like being this close. - I can hit my ' \ ', it comes out, I move my Playhead, click it again and it zooms into whatever that zoom level was, that you were at. 

So you can kind of move around, zooming in and out of that exact same size, by just tapping it on and tapping it off. The other shortcut I want to give you, we've done before, I want to reiterate a few of them because I'm going to give you a big job, a big class project in the next one, and you'll need some of these. Remember, if you need to close these gaps, click once, hit 'Del'. Nice, that's an easy one. The other one is, holding 'Shift' when you're dragging the Playhead. Remember, it jumps between the beginning and the end. 

So I'm holding 'Shift' on my keyboard, dragging the 'Playhead' or the 'CTI', and it will snap into the appropriate parts. Where it won't work is if you've got something that's on this. So you need to have all of those on as the basic default. It allows us to use the keyboard shortcut up and down as well. It's another really good one for the upcoming task. 

So I'm just using my down arrow just to jump to the next significant thing, either the beginning of the clip, end of the clip, some of the centers. Another thing you can do that is useful is, if you hold down the 'Shift' key, click on, say this one, you can hold 'Shift' and click on this. So I've got two selected so I can drag two of them around at a time. I can drag a box around them, but obviously it can only get the ones that are in line, but if you need to grab this one or maybe this one, but not that, you hold down the 'Shift' key and click them, then you can move just those parts. 

The next one, and probably the best one, not sure why I left this to be like the fourth on the list, but it is my favorite shortcut in all of Premiere Pro, and it is the Tilde key. It is, let me show it to you, it looks like this. Where is it? It is-- have I spelt that right, Tilde. It is the key that looks like that, the little wave on it. So you're looking for that little wave. It's everywhere on lots of different people's keyboards. On my current keyboard, my last Mac, was there, on my new Mac it's down over here for some reason. They like to move this thing around, actually it's down over here, but you'll notice that some keyboards, I know, I've had people from France complain that they don't have it at all. There are ways of figuring it out. So you might just have to look for your particular laptop's Tilde key. 

Once you've got it though, what does it do? It does this. Ready to tap it, so wherever your mouse is, watch this, if I hit the Tilde key above my Program Window, it makes it full screen, you're like, "Yeah, hope you do," but watch this, hovering, don't have to make it bloat, just hovering above my Timeline, oh, I hit the 'Tilde' key, goes full screen. How cool is that? There's a chance that I'm excited because I'm a nerd, and you're not going to be that excited, but I think it's amazing, like especially down here, look, the Thumbnails, look at Cam B. 'Tab', I can see them all, look at that, super helpful. 

Anything you want to hover above, the Lumetri Color Panel, anything that you want to go full screen, what I use it for is the Bin. So in here, my Project Window, I can just go full screen, start looking at things, cleaning things up, dragging them around, deleting them, hit the 'Tilde' key again, and the Timeline is probably the most obvious. We can start doing stuff in here, and start looking at it, you're like, "Actually, just want to move this around", rather than trying to scrub back and forth in this teeny tiny window, hit the Tilde key. Now it's not so much where you've got it selected, it's where your mouse is. Remember, mouse hovering, full screen. Hovering, you just toggle it, so click it off to turn it off again. All right, those should get you going with your next project. 

There's one other thing I want to show you, I'll show you my keyboard. The trained spotters might have spotted my colored keyboard already. I'll show you that. This is it here, basically just a keyboard you can plug in, and it has all the shortcuts for Premiere Pro. Just got to get a close-up of it. There it is there. So we've been talking about setting our in and out points, it's I and O, and it's written here on it. Remember, we go from Selection to Razor. 

Now who is this good for? It's good for people who plan on doing lots of video editing. If you just got to do this once, every now and again, it's not worth buying the keyboard, it's going to be on your desk, kind of in the way, but if you are doing a bit of this, what I found really useful for it, was when my computer's like catching fire, and, spending time trying to load, I was just looking at my keyboard, I was like, "Look at that." There's that thing I use all the time, and I can go through and Match Frame, or Zoom Tool, or Track Select, or Snap. There's lots of things on here, we'll cover through the course, but it just really helped me kind of figure out some of these ones.
 
You can see, you can jump to Panels, it's all very cool. These actually exist on your keyboard. Just, you know, if I hit the 'Y' key on my keyboard now, without the special keyboard, it's still going to go to the Slip Tool, it's just like a visual guide. So for me now though, that I've been using it for a long time, it's not as useful anymore, because I know all the shortcuts, I'm getting really good at it. I still have it on when I'm doing video editing. It makes me feel like I'm doing my video editing properly. 

I'll show you where it is, if you go to 'bringyourownlaptop.com/keyboard', I'll put it in your Links file, in your Notes as well. Mark, it's Mark Brown, the guy that runs EditorsKeys, small company, they do some really cool keyboards. I do have an affiliate deal with them, I pay for my own keyboard, because, I don't know, I feel like it's better to work it out yourself, rather than get sent a free one or demand a free one, but I really like it. Have a look, so under Video Editing, there's After Effects, there's Premiere Pro. If you are more of a Graphic Designer, either Photoshop ones, Illustrator, now he assures me that this backlit one is the best one. I got the non backlit corded one, and I kind of regret it now, only because there's a cord. There's a wireless version, and he said this one here is the best. It's a little bit more expensive, and look how fancy it is, all backlit. 

The cool thing about these keyboards is that they're color coded to be more like, so all the blue things do a very similar function, and same with like these pink ones across the middle here. These are the Stop, Play, Pause, Forward buttons. They do a similar kind of group of things. So if you're looking for editing, like doing cuts, and kind of rough cut on the Timeline, you can look at all the blue ones. There are ones that aren't just keyboard, so if you've got skins, where the keyboard covers, there's not one yet available for my new MacBook Pro at the moment, so I have the keyboard, but it will come live in here, you can get skins to go at the top if you do have--

They've only got them for Macs unfortunately, oh no, Service Pros, I think they've got them for, as well. Mine's in Euros, US Dollar's not far off that. The keyboards are more expensive, around the 100 Euro mark. So they're great if you are new, and you're going to do a lot of video editing, perfect. They're also really good if you are experienced, but can never remember all the shortcuts, then you end up at a place like me, where you don't really need it anymore, and I put it out there because it makes me feel like I'm doing video editing properly. 

It's like a Graphic Designer with a Wacom tablet, that never uses it, or, I don't know, a Developer that, turns their screen portrait, because they get more coding going. It's kind of a look. Ask me how I know, I've got a Wacom that I use some other time, really, I get it because that's what Graphic Designers have, and I'm a Graphic Designer, but do I use it every single day? I should because I spent money on it. Sometimes these things, like if you want to look like a boss editor at your office, you get one of the keyboards or one of the skins, people walk passing go,. "Yep, that person knows what they're doing, look at them, with all the colored buttons." Anyway, check out EditorKeys, and you too can learn new shortcuts, while your computer is rendering or freaking out trying to render something. All right, that's it for these shortcuts, let's get on to our class project.