Since we have been using Adobe Premiere Pro in class so much over the recent couple of days, I decided I would review an article entitled “How to Use the J, K, and L Keys in Premiere Pro to Speed Up Your Workflow”. The article acknowledges just how tedious editing can be, especially since the differences between “well done” and “sloppy” can come down to just the smallest of details. However, there are some keyboard shortcuts that can help speed up the project, while making less unintentional errors and brewing frustrations. It’s also good that none of these shortcuts are too complicated for a beginner, which really helps make learning how to use the software much easier.
First of all, every editor needs to know how to start and stop playing their clips, wether the project is a slide show, movie, music video, etc. Every project should be reviewed before it can be completed. Everyone should be familiar with the play button on screen, but another shortcut would just be the K key or simply the space bar. It’s much easier to just press the space bar to start and stop a clip than to move your mouse over to another panel every time you need to play the project. It’s especially good when there’s some minor details that need fixing, because you won’t have to move around from panels so frequently.
Now in more advanced situations, Shift+J, Shift+L and the Right Arrow key come in handy quite a bit. If you need to play something back slowly, you can just use the Shift+J keys, the will play back the project but in slow motion, very helpful to see what changes should be made with a different perspective, especially when using special effects. Shift+L is also very helpful considering it’s basically the space bar but for slow motion, good for catching any small errors or continuity problems. And the Right Arrow key can play back frame by frame for any very detailed corrections that need to be made. After reading the article, I now know a lot of helpful shortcuts that will surely help me in the editing process for the PSA project and the Slideshow we are working on. It’s very useful to have an article that can be applied to projects we are working on in class, especially when I was wondering about ways to speed up the process myself.
As evidence from the article, there are many different keys and combinations that have different functions in Premiere Pro. I personally would like to know just how many shortcuts there are and which ones I can use to speed up the process. I am going to look up a website that shows the different keybindings and maybe a YouTube tutorial that can teach me how to use them in my projects. There are a lot of functions that I have used in Premiere Pro that I believe probably have a key that I could use to speed up my editing and I intend on finding out what they are.
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