After Effects CC loading

Why keyboard shortcuts are that important?

Have you ever thought about how much time we spend selecting an option from the main menu? Does it annoy you hearing the clicking sound of your mouse hitting one particular command from the menu? For those of you that are working on a daily basis with any program you already know the importance of keyboard shortcuts. But for those of you that might have neglected this aspect here is the reason WHY.

Probably you have asked yourself why should you remember any key combinations within a program as you can access it from the toolbar. I fully agree that all commands can be accessed from the toolbar. But the movement of your mouse cursor from the position you are to the toolbar takes time. You might assume that this is a couple of seconds. For sure it is not a big amount of time, but at the end it all adds up. Not to mention that you relieve your wrist from the movement.

After Effects CC loading

Powered by Shutterstock

 

What is the result?

Well actually the more keyboard shortcuts you know the easier your job will be? This is mainly because we don’t remember always in which menu do we find certain features. Additionally when working on a large screen and a high resolution we have plenty of space to move. The larger the screen and resolution  the more pixels needs our cursor to travel. When it comes to video editing you will need to make a lot of modifications. Scaling, masking, rotating, you name it involve a lot of commands. Without keyboard shortcuts you will need to right click, select the option and left click. That is a lot of clicking. Click! Click! Keyboard shortcuts in the other hand will mostly involve a combination of maximum 3 keys in 90% of the cases.

To make you life easier I will split these keyboard shortcuts into groups. This will make it easier to find a particular keyboard shortcut. Pick your particular shortcut from the list below:

  1. General
  2. Projects
  3. Preferences
  4. Panels, viewers, workspaces, and windows
  5. Activate tools
  6. Compositions and the work area
  7. Time navigation
  8. Previews
  9. Views
  10. Footage
  11. Effects and animation presets
  12. Layers
  13. Showing properties and groups in the Timeline panel
  14. Showing properties in the Effect Controls panel
  15. Modifying layer properties
  16. 3D layers
  17. Keyframes and the Graph Editor
  18. Text
  19. Masks
  20. Paint tools
  21. Shape layers
  22. Markers
  23. Motion tracking
  24. Saving, exporting, and rendering

Sharing is caring!

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.