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How can we improve Premiere Pro?

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Give momentary keypress functionality to hand and zoom tools

Hold H to momentarily activate the Hand tool, move the timeline around, let go of H to return to the previous tool.

Same action for the Zoom tool.

At the present time, you have to reselect the tool when you're done moving around.

HUGE advantage for those of us who use Wacmon tablets and don't have a scroll wheel, as there is no other way to easily move in the timeline. The only way to achieve it with my Wacom, is to hold my top button and scroll the pen up & down - left & right doesn't function in Premiere. And it only registers for the portion of the screen that the timeline window takes up.

Also the same way it functions in Photoshop, it's a very natural way to interface with the application.

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Andrew shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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  • Ben commented  ·   ·  Report

    Can we just get this sorted already? And while you're at it, make zoom and pan work in every window (source, effects controls, media bin etc etc) - it just speeds everything up.

  • Pierre Louis Beranek commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yes! 100%!

    By the way, in Pr 15.1 (beta) the hand tool can now be temporarily invoked by click-holding a mouse's scroll wheel!!!! BUT... ONLY in the new Text window for creating captions. Huh??? Why Adobe, why?! AE has had this basic functionality for ages, so it's high time Pr gets this basic functionality as well, in every area of the program that makes sense rather than just in the new Text window!

    Make sure you check out my FR for this and vote here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/42781670-give-the-mouse-scroll-wheel-the-same-basic-functio

  • Fred Lindgren commented  ·   ·  Report

    Dude, yes. This. It just occurred to me today that navigating the timeline is the most frustrating things getting in the way of what I want to do. I thought by getting a giant monitor to give it a ton of window space, that I would magically not need to zoom and pan and scroll around the timeline as much, but dang was I wrong...

    I noticed that I always had this weird habit of holding the spacebar down when trying to adjust things in the timeline and therefor end up popping all over the place, and I had this epiphany that I keep doing that simply because I'm used to being able to smoothly navigate photoshop that way!

    I wish I had the ability to just hold Z + m1 and just drag left and right to zoom back and forth, and hold space bar to swipe the canvas. That's what's missing from my timeline experience. How can I get that sort of experience?

    I was thinking maybe like a ball mouse for my keyboard hand would be a potential solution, but how do we bring that sort of navigation to the average user?

    I feel like it's a big missed opportunity efficiency wise, so that I can stay focused on the edit.

  • Andrew commented  ·   ·  Report

    Still hoping this will happen one day... as well as doing something with the middle mouse button....

  • JBOY commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hey are you on windows or mac? When I was working on a mac and on a wacom the thing that single-handedly changed my experience was a program called SmartScroll. It gives you the ability to have drag and flick scrolling WITH INERTIA. Basically iphone scrolling but with a mouse. So I assigned one of my wacom buttons to middle-click and then middle-click to the drag and flick trigger within SmartScroll. BOOM your wacom pen is suddenly an iphone scrolly scroll in every application and it's hands down the thing I miss most about windows. Than and better touch tool. Good luck!

  • demafleez commented  ·   ·  Report

    In Cinema 4D, holding down a key to temporarily activate another tool & revert back to the first tool upon release is called Sticky Keys. I'd love sticky keys throughout Premiere.

    Whichever way its implemented, please make the hand and zoom tools work in bins as well! As a wacom user, it's a workflow downer to have to grab scrollbars in bins when in my timeline in can switch to the hand tool and quickly & easily drag from anywhere in the window. The bins should be just as easy.

  • Mat commented  ·   ·  Report

    Ideally Wacom's Pan/Scroll functionality could be mapped to the timeline the same way a Macbook's track pad is, which does allow you to scroll horizontally and vertically simultaneously with two fingers.

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Report

    An interesting predicament. Your solution would work, IF Adobe ever implements it. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
    So I wrote an AHK script that will give you, as a Wacom user, some decent scroll wheel functionality.
    https://github.com/TaranVH/2nd-keyboard/blob/master/Taran's%20Premiere%20Mods/F12_F11_scroller.ahk

    Then I thought, maybe he doesn't know how to use AHK.
    So I made a little video just to show you! (And others)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHbG8HYRwcI

  • Dustin Parsons commented  ·   ·  Report

    I would prefer holding the space bar to temporary change the cursor into the hand tool so it works the same way across all Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects already do this). Timelines are too large not to have this function and Windows is terrible for horizontal or diagonal scrolling.

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