… for Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Tip #1681: A Cool – But Useless – Feature

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

This used to work great. Now, ah, not so much.

There’s a long-time feature in Premiere that used to be really useful. Well, at the least, it was useful. But, now, it’s essentially useless.

Most of the time, when we want to create effects, we select the clip in the timeline, then go to Effect Controls and make our adjustments.

But, there’s a hidden feature in Premiere that, theoretically, saves a step.

Control-click a clip in the Timeline (see screen shot) and a hidden menu appears. Here, you can select a setting, say “Scale,” and a white keyframe line appears in the clip (see the red arrow).

Again, in theory, we can drag this line up or down, or double-click it to add keyframes, to adjust and animate the scale of the clip.

The problem is that line, there, at the bottom, is positioned for 100% scale. We can drag it to 0, or to a minimum setting of 119%; but nothing in-between. It’s positioned too low to be useful because we can’t drag it marginally lower; except to 0. Useless.

We rarely, if ever, scale clips larger than 100%. But we CONSTANTLY need to scale clips smaller than 100%. At least for scaling, this hidden menu option totally fails.

So, experiment on your own to see which of these features work. But, for now, you are better off ignoring this menu and continue to use Effect Controls.