Kevin Monahan

Use keyboard shortcuts to select the panel you need.

While helping users on the Creative Cow Premiere Pro forum the other day, I happened upon a request by a user who wanted to toggle the sequence tabs in the timeline with a keyboard shortcut like he could with Apple Final Cut Pro. At first, I looked all over the manual for such a shortcut but could not find one. The closest thing was to toggle the different windows to the right and to the left. Not exactly what the user wanted!

I then turned to the Premiere Pro engineering staff and was enlightened. I found out that you can toggle tabs in both the Source and Timeline panels by first choosing the shortcut for focusing on that panel, and then repeating the shortcut to toggle to a new sequence or clip.

For example, if you press Shift-3, you will be focused on the timeline panel. By pressing Shift-3 once more, it will toggle to the next open sequence (if multiple sequences are open). Toggle Shift-4 for the Program panel and it works the same way. Pretty cool, eh?

When pressing Shift-2, you’ll be focused on the Source panel. If you have multiple clips loaded into the Source panel, by pressing Shift-2 again, it will toggle to the next clip that you previously loaded. A nice tip is to drag and drop multiple clips into the Source panel all at once. There, they are loaded and ready to be toggled to in an instant.

In other cases, you will need to know the keyboard shortcut to open a specific panel, rather than toggle to it. Here are some handy shortcuts to know, so you can get where you want quickly by using a shortcut.

• Project Panel: Shift-1
• Effects Controls Panel: Shift-5
• Audio Mixer: Shift-6
• Effects Panel: Shift-7
• Media Browser Panel: Shift-8

Share on Facebook