Premiere Pro on a Mac: learning the editing keys
Start with about a dozen keys: J, K and L to play, I and O to mark, Command-K to cut at the playhead, Q and W to trim, and V and C for the Selection and Razor tools. Those cover most of a rough cut. When you want to see the rest, Premiere Pro’s Keyboard Shortcuts editor (Option-Command-K) draws your keyboard on screen and shows what every key does, and lets you change any of it.
Premiere is built to be driven from the keyboard. The trouble is that many of the keys you press most, such as J, K and L and the single-letter tools, appear in no menu, so you cannot pick them up by browsing the menu bar the way you can in most Mac apps. Below: where to see them all, the keys worth learning first, and how to make them stick.
See every key: the Keyboard Shortcuts editor
On a Mac, the editor is in the app menu: choose Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts, or press Option-Command-K (⌥⌘K). On Windows it lives under Edit, so a tutorial made on a PC may send you to the wrong menu.
The window has two halves:
- A drawing of a keyboard at the top. Keys that already have a command are colored. Click a key and a list shows every command on that key, with and without modifiers. Hold a modifier, such as Command or Shift, and the drawing changes to show what that combination does on each key.
- A searchable list of commands below. Type part of a name, such as “ripple” or “marker”, to see its shortcut. Click in the shortcut column next to a command and press new keys to change it.
Two things in this window explain a lot of early confusion:
Some shortcuts belong to a panel. A key can do one thing in the Timeline and another in the Project panel, or nothing at all until the right panel is active. The panel you clicked last has a highlighted outline; if a key seems dead, click in the Timeline or a monitor first.
Not every command has a key. Many commands ship with no shortcut at all. The editor is also the place to find them a free key.
Watch and mark: J, K, L, I and O
Playback and marking are the keys you press most, so learn them first.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play or stop |
| J | Play backward; press again to go faster |
| K | Stop |
| L | Play forward; press again to go faster |
| ← and → | Step back or forward one frame |
| ↑ and ↓ | Go to the previous or next edit point |
| I | Mark In |
| O | Mark Out |
| X | Mark the clip under the playhead |
| M | Add a marker |
J, K and L sit under the three fingers of your right hand. Rest them there and you can scrub, stop and reverse without looking. Pressing L two or three times is the quick way through a long interview; J and K bring you back.
I and O set points in whichever monitor or timeline is active. In the Source Monitor they choose which part of a clip to use; in the Timeline they mark a section of the sequence. The same keys, a different panel, a different result.
Cut, trim and place: Command-K, Q and W
Once you can mark, these put clips together and tighten them:
- Command-K (⌘K) is Add Edit: it cuts the clips on the targeted tracks at the playhead. Shift-Command-K cuts every track. Many editors use it instead of the Razor tool, because the playhead is already where they want the cut.
- Q is Ripple Trim Previous Edit to Playhead: it trims away everything from the start of the clip to the playhead, and closes the gap. W does the same from the playhead to the end of the clip. Park the playhead, press Q or W, and a pause or a fluffed line is gone with nothing left to clean up.
- Comma (,) is Insert and period (.) is Overwrite. They put the marked part of the Source Monitor clip into the sequence at the playhead, on the targeted tracks.
- Semicolon (
;) is Lift and apostrophe (') is Extract. Both remove the marked section of the sequence; Lift leaves a gap and Extract closes it. - Ripple Delete removes a selected clip or gap and closes it up. Its default is Shift-Forward Delete. A MacBook keyboard has no Forward Delete key, so press fn-Shift-Delete instead, or right-click the clip or gap and choose Ripple Delete. The keys a MacBook leaves out covers the fn trick for the others too.
- Equals (=) and minus (-) zoom the Timeline in and out, and backslash (\) fits the whole sequence in view.
A note if your keyboard is not a US layout: semicolon, apostrophe, backslash and equals are not in the same places on every keyboard, and some need Option or Shift. Check where those characters sit on yours before you train your fingers.
The tools: one letter each
Most tools in the Tools panel have a single-letter shortcut. The ones you will meet first:
| Key | Tool |
|---|---|
| V | Selection |
| C | Razor |
| A | Track Select Forward (Shift-A for backward) |
| B | Ripple Edit |
| N | Rolling Edit |
| R | Rate Stretch |
| Y | Slip |
| U | Slide |
| P | Pen |
| H | Hand |
| Z | Zoom |
A habit worth building: treat V as home. Press C, make the cut, press V. Press B, drag the edit, press V. If you leave the Razor tool active by accident, the next click splits a clip you meant to select, an easy mistake to make and an annoying one to find later.
Make the keys stick
Premiere has enough shortcuts that trying to learn them all at once fails. Learn them in layers, and give each a week:
- Playback and marks. Space, J, K, L, I, O and the arrow keys. Edit one project without clicking the play button once.
- Cutting. Command-K, Q and W. Do a rough cut of an interview using only these for the cuts.
- Placing. Comma and period from the Source Monitor, Lift and Extract in the Timeline.
- Tools. V, C, B and N, then the rest as you need them.
Two things speed this up. First, when you catch yourself reaching for a menu or a button, stop, look up the key in the Keyboard Shortcuts editor, and do it again with the key. Doing the action is what fixes it in memory; reading a list is not. Second, keep the keys in view while you work, not in a PDF in another window. How to learn Mac keyboard shortcuts and actually remember them goes into why that matters.
That is where Typebar helps. It puts a keyboard on screen and lights each key as you press it. Hold a modifier, such as Command, for a moment and the keys relabel with what they do in the app in front, read from its own menus. Many of Premiere’s single-letter keys are not in its menus, so Typebar includes a hand-made Premiere Pro pack: hold fn and the board shows Premiere’s single-key shortcuts, such as J, K and L, on the keys themselves.
If you record Premiere tutorials, Typebar’s board and its keystroke pill show viewers which keys you pressed, so they do not have to guess why the clip just split. Placement matters more in an editor than in most apps, because the timeline and monitors fill the screen; where to put a keystroke overlay so it never covers the action has the options. Typebar is $9 once, with a 24-hour free trial.
Questions
What is the shortcut for keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Pro on a Mac?
Option-Command-K, or choose Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts from the menu bar. On Windows the same window is under Edit.
How do I cut a clip at the playhead without the Razor tool?
Press Command-K (Add Edit). It cuts the targeted tracks at the playhead. Shift-Command-K cuts all tracks.
Why does a Premiere shortcut do nothing when I press it?
Usually because a different panel is active. Many shortcuts only work in the Timeline or a monitor, so click in that panel first. If it still does nothing, check the Keyboard Shortcuts editor to see whether the key has been changed or cleared.
Can I make Premiere’s shortcuts match another editor?
You can change any shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcuts editor, and save your set so you can switch back to the defaults. If you move between Premiere and another editor every day, remap the few keys you press most rather than all of them.