Premiere Pro Keyboard Shortcuts to Expand and Collapse Tracks.

Editing in Premiere Pro takes place in the timeline. (That’s probably the most obvious statement we’ve ever made on the blog.) The more you can control the timeline and the faster you can navigate your clips, the better an editor you will be. In this tutorial, featuring a video by Vashi Nedomansky, you will learn three “secret” keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Pro to quickly expand and collapse video and audio tracks in the timeline. Vashi shares his three custom keys to make these shortcuts even faster. Use these shortcuts to literally get closer to your edit!

NOTE: These 3 track height keyboard shortcuts are assigned in the default Adobe Premiere Pro keyboard layout. But Vashi’s custom shortcuts are much more practical. Because navigating the timeline quickly is critical to editing, it makes sense to have theses track height controls mapped to something easy to remember.

Vashi Nedomansky’s “Secret” Track Height Technique

It’s always cool when a Hollywood film editor shares their tips and tricks. Vashi begins his video with an overview of his career and qualifications as a film editor. Having cut 11 feature films and trained 4 Oscar-winning editors, Vashi has a lot of experience editing in Premiere Pro. This particular Premiere Pro tip is one that Vashi says makes editors “freak out”. Watch the video below to see why.

3 Track Height Keyboard Shortcuts

The timeline in Premiere Pro is extremely flexible. (It really doesn’t get enough credit IMHO. The ability to see markers and waveforms, even in minimized tracks, is awesome!) In the later stages of editing, especially on feature films, the number of video and audio tracks can really pile up. It can get difficult to see what’s going on in your video and audio tracks. Oftentimes, editors will resort to the mouse and start scrolling, clicking, and dragging on tracks to get a closer view of the timeline. Not very efficient at all.

Vashi has come up with 3 custom keyboard shortcuts that make expanding and collapsing video and audio tracks way faster in Premiere Pro. They are:

Increase Video Track Height

Evenly expands the height of all video tracks.

Increase Audio Track Height

Evenly expands the height of all audio tracks.

Minimize All Tracks

Collapses all video and audio tracks to their smallest height.

Combine these 3 track height shortcuts with the tilde key (~) for full screen view of the timeline and you have a very fast workflow for navigating the timeline in Premiere Pro.

How to Set Track Height Keyboard Shortcuts

Customizing keyboard shortcuts is very simple thanks to Premiere Pro’s visual keyboard shortcut editor. In this next segment, Vashi shows how to find and edit the 3 track height keyboard shortcuts.

Open the keyboard shortcut editor in Premiere Pro and search for the three functions shown below. You can also see Vashi’s custom keys for these 3 shortcuts.

Increase Video Track Height = 1
Increase Audio Track Height = 2
Minimize All Tracks = 3

Obviously, you can set these to whatever keys work best for you.

What do you think of this keyboard shortcut tip? Was it helpful? If yes, the good news is Vashi says he has more “Hollywood” editing tips coming soon, so subscribe to his channel and stay tuned! Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.