As you get more advanced with your editing in Premiere Pro CC, you may find yourself wanting to use the keyboard shortcuts, rather than clicking your mouse on the user interface, so that you can edit more quickly. Before you customize your keyboard, you may want to see what the default keyboard shortcuts are. To see these, go to the Premiere Pro menu (go to the Edit menu on a PC) and choose Keyboard Shortcuts. The Keyboard shortcut window will open.

If I click on these reveal arrows, I can see the commands and the default keyboard shortcuts listed to the far right, so this is where you can find and learn what they are. Notice that some commands don’t have a keyboard shortcut, so you may want to assign one yourself. Under the “Window” keyboard shortcuts, I can see that there isn’t a default keyboard shortcut to open the History window in my project pane. So to create one, I just double click on the blank shortcut field at the far right. I’ll type in Command then F on my keyboard. Notice that there’s a yellow warning triangle with a message letting me know that the File > Find command is already using that keyboard shortcut. So, instead, I’ll type in Command H. I didn’t get a warning triangle, so I’ll just click OK to save my history window shortcut and close that window.

Now I can click the command H keyboard shortcut, and my history pane opens right up. Notice that if I go back into my keyboard shortcuts window, the Keyboard Layout preset now says “Custom” at the top because I’ve made a change to the default set of shortcuts. It’s a good idea to give your new custom set of keyboard shortcuts a name, so I’ll click on where it says “Save As”, type in a name like “KK Layout” and click OK. Now whenever you want to make a change to your saved custom keyboard shortcuts, be sure to choose it from the pulldown window in the Keyboard shortcuts window before you add another one.

Another cool feature is that if you know another editing application’s keyboard shortcuts really well, such as Premiere Pro CS 6, Avid Media Composer 5 or Final Cut Pro 7, you can select it in this pulldown menu, click OK and all the keyboard shortcuts for that application will become the default.

Whether you decide to add more keyboard shortcuts to the default Premiere Pro CC keyboard or switch to another editing application’s shortcut commands, learning and using the keyboard shortcuts will save you a lot of time as you work.

©2016 Michael Rosenblum and Lisa Lambden