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Changing Track Size (Timeline Track Height)

Forum|Forum|22 days ago
June 23, 2026
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📏 Changing Track Size in the Timeline

TL;DR

Track height affects visibility, not playback or export
Taller tracks reveal more waveform detail
This is a timeline view preference — not a sequence setting
Multiple methods exist: drag, scroll shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts, and saved presets

The Common Confusion

Users often assume track size affects:

Audio loudness ❌
Waveform resolution ❌
Export output ❌

It only affects what you see while editing.

Why Adjust Track Size

Increase track height to:

Make waveform transients clearer
Align edits more precisely
Reduce eye strain on dense timelines

How to Adjust Track Height

Manual drag

Hover over the dividing line between tracks in the track header area and drag up or down. Easy to find, but harder to get consistent sizes across tracks.

Double-click the track header

Double-click the gray track header to toggle between standard and expanded height. Quick way to reset a track if it's gotten out of hand. Audio tracks will also expand to reveal their L/R channel breakdown.

Scroll shortcuts

Shift + Scroll — resizes all tracks at once
Shift + Ctrl (PC) / Shift + Cmd (Mac) + Scroll — same, but slower and more precise
Alt (PC) / Option (Mac) + Scroll — resizes only the track under your cursor
Alt/Option + Ctrl/Cmd + Scroll — single track, slow and precise

Keyboard shortcuts for video and audio separately

Ctrl/Cmd + Plus or Minus — increases or decreases video track height only
Alt (PC) / Option (Mac) + Plus or Minus — increases or decreases audio track height only

Save a track height preset (power tip)

Get your tracks sized exactly how you like them, then open the keyboard shortcut editor with Ctrl+Alt+K (PC) / Cmd+Option+K (Mac), search for "height," and assign a shortcut to your saved Track Height preset — something like Shift+Y. From then on, one keystroke snaps your timeline back to your preferred layout no matter how scrambled it gets.

📎 Resources:
Edit Track Appearance
Default Timeline preferences

Stan Jones

Community Expert

@Kevin-Monahan,

Awesome! Very handy reference. The only one I can add is that I discovered that Shift +/- maximizes/minimizes all video and audio tracks.

So what about those cousins of the Video and Audio Tracks, the Caption Tracks? And why adjust their track size? Some of the caption text shows in the caption segment in the timeline. Increasing/decreasing the caption track height makes that text bigger/smaller.

Caption tracks respond to the Scroll keyboard shortcuts and are included in the track height presets.

But you cannot manually drag between caption tracks to change the size, you must use the scroll operations. They do not have an option for the keyboard shortcuts +/-, and they do not respond to a double-click in the header.

This always comes up: The caption track area was designed by the programmers to be a maximum of 25% of the total timeline area due to the greater importance of the video/audio areas. That maximum cannot be increased. But you can force more of that 25% to be visible: 1) increase track height (it scrolls out of view), 2) click the CC in the timeline header area, 3) pick Hide all caption tracks, and 4) Show all caption tracks. It will increase the total caption track area up to the maximum. That trick (hide all/show all) also helps with some other quirks – sometimes caption track area scroll bars do not appear.

Stan

K

Kevin-Monahan

Author