Make Those Tracks Bigger

Here’s a simple shortcut that will give you more control over your timeline:

The SHIFT T command, when pressed repeatedly, cycles you through 4 levels of track height in the timeline. Note that the timeline needs to have focus for this shortcut to work, however. There are a couple of key places where this command comes in particularly handy and I’ll give you another related hint after the jump…

This shortcut is very useful when you’re doing some serious audio-based editing or working on music beds based on the waveforms–expand the Track size to get a much better view of the waveform detail. Also, when you have a complex edit that is several tracks tall and you need to move large segments around (preferably with the TTTT tool), it’s nice to be able to see the whole height of the Timeline contents easily.  Notice that there is a little Track Height Indicator at the very bottom of the Timeline to tell you which size you’re in (see illustration at bottom of page).

Closely related to this shortcut is the method for customizing the height of either all Tracks (beyond the 4 preset heights available with SHIFT T) or even individual tracks. Simply click on the fine dividing line that separates tracks (see illustration at left) with your mouse and drag it to suit.  Only the track you drag will be adjusted. To adjust all tracks this way, simply add the OPTION key when clicking and dragging.

One nice way to use this is to maybe make your music track or audio bed tracks very narrow and leave your dialogue tracks nice and tall.

Whatever changes you make will be saved along with that particular Sequence in that project going forward, but new sequences will revert to the standard track height.

Finally, if you like the way you set up your track heights, you can also save them as a preset to apply to other tracks by clicking the little right-facing arrow that appears to the immediate right of the current Track height Indicator (see illustration at right). Click the arrow and select “Save Track Layout.” Note that you can then use the same little menu to reload and apply other saved track layouts. Frankly, with the flexibility and ease of the above processes, I’ve never really felt the need to save a track Layout, but your mileage may vary.