Welcome to Tool Tip Tuesday for Adobe Premiere Pro on ProVideo Coalition.
Every editor has to delete and ripple delete clips out of their edit timeline. Premiere editors seem to often be focused on the keyboard’s Delete button and the Ripple Delete shortcut (option+delete on Mac). The Premiere also has the Lift and Extract keys, which do something very similar, with an important distinction.
The Delete key is an obvious key on the keyboard, but to properly use Lift and Extract, first you must know where those keys are:
- Lift ;
- Extract ‘
In short, the Lift and Extract keys will remove media between the IN to OUT points. The Delete button and the Ripple Delete shortcut will remove only the clips currently selected in the timeline. This is an important distinction because it can trip up an editor if you’re unaware that you might have a clip selected in the timeline. If you have clips selected in the timeline but are zoomed in and do not realize they are selected, marking an IN to OUT point and then pressing Delete will delete the selected clips that are out of view. A second press of the Delete key will then delete what is between the in and out points.
The Lift and Extract keys respect which tracks are targeted in the timeline. For example, in the gif above, the A1 Audio 1 track has targeting turned off, so the blue audio clip does not get removed when the Lift key is pressed.
Ripple delete will delete and close the gap. First, Ripple delete deletes the clips selected in the timeline, and then what is between the IN to OUT points. Understanding these distinctions is important and can be very useful when editing, because selecting clips with the Selection Tool selects the entire clip while setting IN to Out points, lets you lift or extract only what falls between those points. It doesn’t have to be the whole clips.
If you’ve never heard of the Lift and Extract keys in Adobe Premiere, that’s not entirely surprising. So many YouTube tutorials teach the long way around when it comes to deleting and ripple deleting:
- Have the editor move the playhead to the section that needs to be deleted.
- Add an edit at the top and bottom of the section to be deleted.
- Select the clips using the selection tool.
- Use Ripple Delete or the Delete key.
This can be the long way around when the same thing can often be achieved by Mark In, Mark Out, Lift / Extract / Delete / Ripple Delete. This is three moves instead of six or seven. This is a great example of how YouTube tutorials often teach incorrect or much less efficient techniques for editing. Experiment with Lift/Extract versus Delete and Ripple Delete, and you may speed up your editing.
This series is courtesy of Adobe