cs4

If you grew up in the late 70's or early 80's like I did, you could not go five minutes without seeing one of the now famous spelling commercials on tv. First came the Oscar Meyer jingle:

Oscar Meyer has a way of B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

Next came Tommy Lasorda spelling relief R-O-L-A-I-D-S.

No wonder I can spell so well!

The subject of this post, thus, is about the letters (and symbols) that mean a lot to me:

Relief from endless mouse clicks and eye movement in Premiere is spelled J-K-L-;

Let me explain. Back in the day I was edited a video on our old ACE 25 edit controller. For the benefit of those younger than say 25 we used to cut video machine to machine, using DOS-based editing controllers to not only sync up the decks, but also control via GPI signals the switcher, CG, DVE or ADO and in some cases the audio mixer. The ACE-25 actually had a built in audio mixer. Thus during a preview, you could set the timing of the switcher effect and setup your audio levels. Then when you hit "execute", actually hitting the preview and record buttons together, the machines would pre-roll, roll and record your edit automatically. Pretty sophisticated work for a 8088 processor with half a megabyte of RAM and a lot of dust bunnies inside the CPU. Here's a picture of the ACE 25 and the VPR-80 1" to get you in the mood:



The whole reason for this trip back to Hill Valley, circa 1955, was to talk about motion memory. In other words, do something enough times and you can do it with your eyes closed. Operate the ACE-25 long enough, and you know where the keys are without looking, even the keys that change function depending upon what the CRT display shows. Touch typing is the same, although as I get older and my typing gets faster, I Make the sammee errorsa with greater frequencyu./

Enter Nonlinear editing. The AVID has always had the custom keyboard with labeled functions. For Premiere you can buy such a keyboard, however some of the built-in factory keyboard commands are logical, while others cause two serious problems. Anytime you need to use the mouse, for functions that are used with any frequency, you are putting yourself at risk for RSI. Also, anytime you need to move your eyes from the screen to the keyboard, just to change finger positions, you lose focus. Do this 500 times a day and you could lose hours of productivity.

Now to the subject of this post. J-K-L are the default Premiere keys for Play in reverse (J) - Stop (K) - and Play forward (L). A lot of the editing I do is cutting a full reel down using the razor tool, then ripple deleting the whole sequence to get my first edit. I have thus changed the default Razor at Cursor command from CTRL + / to ; - thus I can easily park my ring finger of my left hand on J, made easier to find by that little pimple on the key, my middle finger on K and my index finger on L, and without moving my eyes or my mouse, move my index finger to ; to razor at the cursor. I still need to use the mouse to select and delete a clip, but there must be a way to do that with keys also. I have thought about changing SAVE to the H key, so I can save my work without changing positions of hands or eyes. And to boot, you can hold down K and either hit J or L one press at a time to go forward or back one frame at a time, meaning you don't need the arrow keys, and you can hold down K and press and hold J or L to move forward or back slowly. This is like switching a machine gun from burst to full automatic. (As if I have so much as seen or touched a machine gun; I read all of Andy McNab's books and pretend to know what I am talking about!).

Here, in the very latest HD video quality known to us insiders as Samsung Cell Phone Video, here's what I call "dance of the digits":


So in summary, learn your keyboard shortcuts, but change them to suit your workflow and habits. I have weaned myself away from some of the Media 100 shortcuts, which I depended upon for the first year or so of Premiere usage. However CS4 has changed selected functions, such as Target higher or lower track, so it's time to retrain my brain yet again. I am going to have to start doing crossword puzzles in order to keep my brain firing on all cylinders. Maybe I can run an RS-422 cable from my cerebral cortex to my dusty old ACE-25 and call upon the unprecedented power of MS-DOS 3.0!!

Thanks for reading.

Mike Cohen