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Best Hidden Keyboard Shortcuts

We know that you can make individual tracks larger and smaller, and you can do that multiple ways. I can just put my mouse or my trackpad, and scroll on any of these, and that will make that track larger. So I'm doing my video track. If I hold down modifier keys, I'm holding down the shift key when scrolling, and it's making all of my video tracks bigger. I can do the same thing for audio, hold down the shift, it makes them all bigger and smaller. But I can do the same thing with keyboard shortcuts. So, if I click on a track, so I have this track here, I just want to make sure it's selected, and if I go Command + -, it makes that smaller, and Command + + makes all my tracks bigger, okay, Command + and -. For video, I have an option for an alternate way I can do it. So if I hold down the Option key, or the Alt key... Did you like the way I did that? An optional, alternate way to do that. I can make my audio tracks bigger and smaller, all at the same time. The other thing I like to do wi...

th my track height is just quickly jump back and forth between a larger size and a smaller size. And so, I shift my thinking, and I go Shift + +, and that will make both the video and the audio all larger, to a predefined area, and Shift + -, which will make them smaller, to a predefined area. A lot of the stuff that I'm gonna be covering will be here. So we have this, I'm about to talk to how you can modify your timeline displays, but if we go ahead and jump to the next slide, it's again gonna be a variation on this. I have a quick question about that last thing you did. It's a basic question. What is the actual purpose of making them larger or smaller, just visibility? Does it show more information? Does it keep track of where you are? That actually is a great question. I keep forgetting everybody's miked, I'm always used to repeating the question. So the situation is, why would I even wanna do this, what are the advantages? And it's twofold. At first blush, what most people think is, "Oh, I can see my waveforms for my audio bigger," like that wonderful music, if I make the audio tracks bigger. And let's see if I have that other cut of wonderful music. I know you wanna hear the first cut again, but I think this one actually had something more exciting happening here. Go ahead and trim that, bring that down, gonna show you some trim techniques. So if I really wanted to work with the audio, I could scroll this down and make that bigger, and then if I wanna zoom in, I can see quite a bit of detail. That's what we normally think of making a track bigger for. And the same thing if I make the video track bigger, and I need to actually zoom out, I can usually see, if I'm zoomed in enough, a little picture icon of the first frame of video, so it gives me some more information. If these things are shorter, I'm gonna hit the Shift + - key, I don't see all that information. I can see all my tracks, which gives me control, but I can't see everything, and that's why I might wanna make something bigger. And it has to be a certain minimum height for me to see my picture icons. It also has to be a certain minimum height for me to see my waveforms. But the reason I like this question, cause it leads me into some other things you can do with your timeline to make it more useful. And you notice in that slide I showed you that there was a dropdown menu. We don't have to go back to the slide, we're gonna go to the real thing. Do you see this wrench right here? This wrench is going to allow me to modify how the timeline display is displayed. So if I click on that, I can choose what I want to see, or in some cases, what I don't want to see. So, if I'm not working with needing the audio waveforms, and I find it a distraction, I can go ahead and I can turn off audio waveforms. Or, one thing I do like to turn off is, there is your opacity keyframes, which is sometimes on in the video, so I'm gonna go ahead and say video keyframes, so a lot of times, this is on by default, this line here. And I don't know if this has happened to any of the hundreds of thousands of people who are actually tuning in right now, but it's likely that you go to move a clip, and when you grab that clip, you grab this line here, and instead of moving the clip, you move the line, not realizing it, and what you've just done is turn down the opacity on this clip. And now you're going, "Why is this clip black?" And you don't know why, cause you didn't remember doing it, because you grabbed that line by accident. And this is normally on by default. So, if you want to avoid that, you can go here under the wrench and say, do not show my video keyframes. I don't need them now. And that way, I won't accidentally use them. Let's take a look at some of the other options, some of the other things that we can do, down here, that I like. So this basically is turning on everything we wanna see, or we don't wanna see. And the other cool thing that you can do here is, if you want to, you can set this up that Track 1 is really big, so you can see your thumbnails, but maybe you want Tracks 2, 3, and 4 of your video to be small. And maybe you want the same thing with your audio, maybe you want Tracks 1 and 2 to be large, so you can see your waveforms. So you can set all that up, and you can save it as a preset, so you don't have to go readjusting things over and over again. So if I wanted this to be big, and I wanted this to be small, and I wanted this to be small, so now I'm creating a specific look and feel, I can go ahead and I can save this as a preset. And I'll call this "Abba's Fine Cut," and I can say, "You know what? "I'm gonna even give it a keyboard shortcut." I haven't assigned it yet, but I'm gonna say, "When I do assign it, it's gonna get Track Height 1." Okay, I hit okay. So now, let's say I'm working through, I'm zooming in and out there, and I'm zooming down there. All I have to do is go to my wrench, now that I've created it, and you'll see there's "Abba's Fine Cut." I was trying to zoom in there and I missed it. There we go. I click on that, and it goes to the exact height layout that I like. I assigned it a potential keyboard shortcut. So if I wanted to make it a real keyboard shortcut, I need to go into my keyboard shortcut preferences. On a Mac, it's underneath where we have Premiere Pro. It would be under File if you're on a Windows machine. I'm gonna go up here, and I'm gonna do Keyboard Shortcuts. And what I wanna do is, this is Track Height Preset, and I will type in... Pretty sure it's called Track Height Preset. There it is. Track Height Preset 1. I said Track Height Preset 1 was what I like. That's Abba's layout. I'm gonna go ahead and give this a keyboard shortcut. To give it a keyboard shortcut, I just click under Shortcut, and I need to pick a keyboard shortcut that's empty. Well, these are all the ones that are used without a modifier key. If I hold down a modifier, like the Shift key, I can see which ones are being used. So maybe, just for grins, I'll go Shift + . That's not being used, so we'll go down here, Shift + ., we're gonna accept that, okay. Now, when I'm working in my sequence, I'm editing away and I'm ready to do my fine cutting, and this is all discombobulated, I simply go Shift + ., and I have the layout that I saved, the layout that I like. So being able to do that very quickly is very, very useful. Let's take this to another level. There's another reason why I like to have my tracks much higher than the default. And I'm going to cheat here, and give myself a little more real estate. You can go ahead, and you can, of course, change the layout of your workspace, and if you do change it, and you like it, you can save it by going to Workspace and Save as a new workspace, but we're not gonna do that. I'm gonna go ahead and make my audio really tall, and I'm gonna make my video really tall. And we're gonna zoom in, and I'm gonna show you some really cool things. First of all, if you make it tall enough, you can see the second track, where it says Audio 1. Not very useful for me. What I really would like to do is, have that named "Narration," our voiceover, and then one named "Music," and one named "Sound Effects." So if I right-click on that, I can rename that track, and I can call this "Narration," even though I have music on the track. And I could go down to the next one, Audio 2, and I could right-click on that, and I could say Rename, "Music." So now, when I look at this, it's not just Audio 1, I know I put all my music on this track, I put all my sound effects on this track, I put all my voice on tape on a certain track, and I can see it. But here's the problem. I make this nice and small, I lose that information. (sighs) Life can be so challenging. So, I'm gonna make it big again. I'm gonna show you a cool little area. I wanna modify how this is organized. And you see there's a bunch of different things. There's sync locking, and I can mute a track, so if I hit this, by the way, and you play, you don't hear the track. I can solo the track, so if I click on this, it mutes all the other tracks. It's a great way to isolate something. If I wanna record something, I can make this the voiceover track, so I can record this. So this is all there on my first track, and maybe I use this a lot, maybe I don't. And then, if I really make it big, I can actually show my keyframes and jump to them. But if I go up here under that wrench that we had, and at the very bottom, I say Customize Audio Headers, I will get this great little layout, where I can customize my audio layers. Well, first of all, you know what? I want my narration to be up here. So I'm gonna go where it says Track Name, and I'm gonna put that on the first row. Okay, it disappeared from that third row. I don't use track locks much, so I'm gonna go ahead and just get rid of that. And I want some other things here. I wanna be able to see some of my meters, I wanna see the volume of that track, so maybe that'll be useful for me on the second layer. And maybe I also wanna see... And you get little pop-ups, by the way. Let's see if I can bring this over here... A meter for that. And then, I could do stereo panning, for left and right balance, so I'm putting that on the third track. And I'm not doing a lot of voiceover recording, I want that to be on the third track. And let's just go ahead and put, on the fourth area, my track sync. And there's a whole bunch of things here, but I think I pretty much used everything. So now I've done that, I hit Okay, and take a look what happens when I make this as small as possible. I'm hitting the Shift + - key. Now, because of the track name being, not on the second, but on the first row, even when this is fully reduced, I can go ahead and say, "Ah, Narration, Music, Audio." Becomes much more valuable to me than the original layout. And, if I go ahead and I make this track wider, again, I'm just rolling it, you'll see I have some other cool things on here. Cause I added a track meter, and I added panning, and I also added a track volume option. So if I go ahead and hit play... Let me see if I can jump my playhead back to the beginning. To jump your playhead back to the beginning, the Home key, or the End key on an extended keyboard, if you're working on a laptop, Left and Right Arrow generally moves you back and forth a frame, but if you hit the Function key and the Left Arrow, it'll move you to the beginning of your sequence. And if you hold the Function key and the Right Arrow, it'll move you to the end of your sequence. So I'm gonna hit Function + Left Arrow, it's at the beginning, and I'm gonna hit play. As soon as we start hearing the music, (music) I have meters. I can see the meters for this track. So that's pretty cool. And if I right-click on that little teeny meter thing, I can even control... Now, I've made some changes already. Normally, this is your default. Normally, it's a gradient. Normally, you don't see the valleys. And normally, you do not see dynamic peaks. So this is normally how you see your meters. (music) Which is nice. And, by the way, it's just fully reflected on the same meters over here. But I like to get more information form my meters. So I will right-click on it, and I will say, "Show me my static peaks," which means it's gonna hold for a second, so I can see how loud individual parts of that music are getting. If I want it to show valleys, it shows me where it gets the quietest. But I definitely wanna switch from gradient, which is nice, to really specifics. (music) And I can see the parts that are good, that are warning in yellow, and if it gets too loud, it'll go into the red. And because I've changed it there, it will also change... Make this a little bit bigger. (music) There. So this is in a gradient, and it's telling me that I'm peaking, and I can very quickly know, "Yeah, I'm hitting about minus three, "but I'm not over modulating." So that's very, very useful to me, and those are some of the changes I make. And some of the advantages, now, of making a track higher, other than just seeing the waveform, it's giving you a lot of information. While we're down here, let me point out a couple of other things. I added a panning option here. And, at first blush, you might go, "Oh yeah, you click on it and you drag it over, "and you try to get it to work." That's not what it's all about. You'll never wanna do panning that way. But, if you wanna go to the left or the right track, it's really easy. You simply click on the L or the R, and it immediately pans that track to the left or the right. And it's nice having that button on your timeline. No, I would not necessarily... I would do my panning probably in the audio mixer, but to have this here and say, "You know something? I just want this "to come out of the right track, I just want this "to come out of the left track," is pretty good. The other thing that you see here is a track volume virtual slider. And people may go, "Okay, I changed... "I put in a bunch of keyframes, "I'm keyframing my audio." This is something we covered in the basic classes. By the way, to cut to a keyframe, just holding down the Command key or the Control key on Windows. Adding little keyframes, and I say, "Oh look, "my music's gonna get louder there, "and it's gonna get quiet here." And I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm gonna hit play. Function + Left Arrow. You know what? We have some dead music at the beginning here. Let's get rid of that. Didn't do that the proper way, but I will show you the right way of doing it. Okay. (music) Okay, so I think I keyframed where there was nothing, and then I deleted it. So let me go ahead, put some new keyframes in, boom, boom, boom, boom, bring this up. And I know, again, very exciting music. There we go. It goes down, it goes up. If we listen to this... (music) Really soft. (music) Really loud. And I go ahead and I grab this slider, and I say, "You know what? Notch it up six dB." And I look at my keyframes. (music) Nothing's happened. (music) The music's gotten louder. What I want to point out is that, in Premiere, you have two sets of audio controls for your track. You have the clip keyframing, which is what you saw me do, and you also have track keyframing. So right now, I'm looking at the clip, and I'm bringing it up and down. And this is how we normally bring audio levels up and down.