All the time is the best time to learn new tips and tricks for your NLE. Considering many people are working with the Adobe suite and use Premiere Pro CC that is a good place to start.
Also, many programs are able to share shortcuts, so even if Premiere isn’t your main focus there’s likely some good to be learned in this tutorial.
Filmmaker Josh Olufemii is providing us all with one tutorial or tip every day in October and it all starts with a quick rundown on how to work faster in Premiere with a couple of keystrokes. Presented by Quinn Murphy, this tip is all about the Q and W keys.
One of the most time consuming aspects of an edit is trimming and cutting clips down to fit the edit. Considering how much time is spent on the timeline and just moving things around it is a huge help. That is where the W and Q keys come into play.
Let’s say you are working and you want to trim the end of one clip in the middle of your timeline all you have to do is hit W.
What this does is cut out everything up until your next clip and automatically bring everything back in line.
Now, if you have something at the beginning of the clip you want to trim off you have the Q key. It does the same thing but to the front.
There can be some unfortunate side effects of this technique. Being quick and easy isn’t always the best. These shortcuts are more of a blunt object just cutting through everything.
This means if you have a soundtrack underneath your main video tracks you’ll just start slicing that up as well. We obviously don’t want that.
A solution to that problem is by deselecting the tracks you don’t want to edit. Go to the left of the timeline and you can start deselecting by hitting the V1, V2, etc. and A1, A2, etc. buttons. Now the shortcuts will only affect the tracks you want them to.
Again, that is a really quick tip but if you start using it you will see your productivity shoot up. You might want to follow Olufemii for the rest of the month too since there will be plenty more to check out.
[source: Josh Olufemii]
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