Looking for ways to boost my editing efficiency and need your advice!
I’m dealing with some wrist pain from too much mouse clicking and scrolling, so I’m especially interested in keyboard shortcuts that can help me rely less on my mouse. Right now I mainly work in Premiere Pro and feel like I could be way more efficient.
What tools, shortcuts, or techniques completely changed how fast you work? I’m open to anything that might help speed things up.
One thing that already helped me a lot was learning the shortcuts for trimming clips to the playhead position. Using Q and W keys for ripple trimming saved me tons of time compared to dragging edges manually. But I know there must be way more tricks out there that I haven’t discovered yet.
slip and slide tools changed the game for me! alt+click lets you slip footage without screwing timings, and shift+alt slides whole clips while keeping em locked. it beats unlinking audio/video and moving stuff around manually. also, ctrl+k cuts at the playhead way faster than switching tools all the time.
Bracket keys completely changed my editing speed once I figured them out. [ and ] let you set in/out points without moving the playhead—super fast for making subclips or copying sections. Throw in period to match frame and comma to step back one frame, and you can nail precise selections without touching your mouse. Learning blade shortcuts was huge too. C activates the razor tool, but shift+click cuts across all tracks at once. No more tedious clicking through multi-track edits. Page up/down jumps between edit points instead of scrolling around hunting for cuts. But here’s the real game-changer: holding shift while using most shortcuts completely changes what they do in really useful ways.
The real game changer was setting up automated workflows that handle all the repetitive stuff - I barely click anything anymore.
Shortcuts help, but imagine your entire post production pipeline running itself. When I finish editing, one trigger exports multiple formats, uploads to review platforms, notifies clients, and backs everything up to cloud storage.
Perfect for your wrist pain. Instead of manually exporting different versions, uploading files, sending emails, and organizing assets - everything happens automatically. Hit one button and walk away.
I’ve got workflows monitoring project folders that automatically convert footage, create proxies, and organize by date or project type. No more dragging files or clicking through export dialogs.
The magic happens when you connect all your tools. Premiere Pro talks to your storage, which talks to your client portal, which sends notifications. Everything flows without you touching anything.
You can automate the boring stuff too - watermarks, review copies, reports. Set it once, use it forever.
This saved my wrists and doubled my productivity. While others click through menus, my projects finish themselves.
Custom keyboard shortcuts completely changed my editing workflow. I remapped J-K-L to playback speeds that work better for my reviews and set up shortcuts for my most-used effects. The game changer was creating shortcuts for markers and navigation—now I can mark problems during reviews without touching the mouse. Proxy editing saved my wrists too. Working with 4K proxies cut down system lag and all that repetitive scrubbing through timelines. I also mapped the safe margins overlay to a shortcut instead of digging through menus every time. For your wrist pain, try using spacebar for play/pause instead of clicking those transport buttons—it cut my mouse usage way down.