3 Little Keyboard Shortcuts That Will Make Easy Work of Track Height

Editing timeline for 'Deadpool' (2016)Credit: Vashi Visuals

One beautiful, glorious day, NLEs will be able to read our minds and complete tasks without even a twitch from our tingling hands that are suffering in silence within the deepest part of the Carpal Tunnel. However, that day has yet to come, and while our hands must still participate in the editing process, keyboard shortcuts make easier work of it, especially when it comes to navigating your timeline.

In this video, Editor Vashi Nedomansky, who has worked on feature films like Sharknado 2, Gone Girl, and Deadpool, shares a really clever trick that not a whole lot of editors seem to know about, which allows you to change the height of your video and audio tracks with a simple press of a button, rather than the tedious clicking and dragging that you were probably doing before.

If the projects you typically work on are small and only require a handful of tracks for both video and audio, then shrinking track height may not be a huge issue for you. However, if you work on feature films, music videos, or even commercials, the number of tracks is going to skyrocket, and pretty soon, each one is going to appear as a tiny, near-invisible sliver on your timeline.

Vashi's solution can help you avoid having to click and drag each and every track, which, as I said before, is tedious and horrible and no one wants to do it.

Instead, you can assign shortcuts to your "1", "2", and "3" keys on your keyboard that will increase the height of your video and audio tracks in unison, as well as minimize the height of all tracks back to their smallest size to get you back to baseline.

Here's how to do it: 

• Open up Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Type "Increase Video Track Height" into the search bar and assign it to the "1" key.
• Type "Increase Audio Track Height" into the search bar and assign it to the "2" key.
• Type "Minimize All Tracks" into the search bar and assign it to the "3" key.

Super simple, right? And it's something you're going to use all the time while you're editing, so it's definitely worth a try if you're looking to become more efficient as an editor.

If you're a fan of these shortcuts, here are a few more ideas that will help you transform all of your key-combo shortcuts into "single-press" commands, which will have you editing faster in no time.

Source: Vashi Nedomansky