Known Participant

Answered

Easily swap the track arrangement (shifting tracks up or down)

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 7, 2020
13 replies
64777 views

Hey all,

Is there a way to shift an entire track up or down placing them in the order or arrangement you want?

I want to be able to grab V1 and move it to where V3 is, so that it's above the other footage on V2.

Or grab A6 and pull it up to A2, Making old A6 now A2, and previous A2 is now A3.

Curently (as far as I know) you have to highlight all the clips on the track and bump them up when highlighted.

2 problems accure, if you bump up and land on the track above it will overwrite the clips above, or if you unlink the audio video you may misalign sound from video.

How is this not a feature? When I started out 15 years ago with Sony Vegas, it was available. 15 years later I still can't do that in Premiere, or am I missing something?

Correct answer Ann Bens

Select Track Selection Forward Tool (A).

Hold down Ctrl and click on first clip

Drag everthing up or down (dont let go of the ctrl) to new empty track.

Maks2Art

Known Participant

really in Premiere easy function to move down up tracks isn't available. Since 2017 I ve been trying to find the way to do that. Terrible. I need just move up and down tracks without audio tracks. Why it's impossible to do that in Premiere. It's the easiest neccesary function in all programmes. Only not for Premiere.

A

Andrey_Kochergin7969

Participant

the end of 2K24. big update just came out. AI stuff is everywhere, "supadupa" features here and there, but PP is still here! stupid s*t. why the f we still should change order of tracks that way? so annoying

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Charismatic_heart5F91

Participant

A whole new generation of nl editors have NO idea what they're missing. I've been editing both linear and non for 35+ years and Premiere is a hot inefficient mess compared to Vegas in 2025.

N

Noncent$

Participant

I'm a little late to this conversation but I think believe I know what your looking for cuz I was too. Double click on one of the tracks and instead and clicking "Add Track" make sure you click on "Add Tracks..." and that will allow you to create a track in before or after another. This doesn't fix your moving problem for tracks lines, but if you plan ahead accordingly, I think this should work.

J

jeffbottom

Inspiring

this is insanely frustrating, I wonder if there isn't a simple way to do it via scripting?

D

dpalkowski3

Known Participant

Doubtful, since the track structure seems to rely heavily on index numbers, so dragging track 2 on top of track 1 or vice versa would screw up some internal logic. Better to get rid of the index numbers altogether, e.g. pro tools. Name tracks as you like, and drag them however you want.

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Todd KCCOAuthor

Known Participant

In my experience with Sony Vegas, if you move track V1 to above V4, V2 would then become V1, and the old V1 would now read V4.
It would just automatically rename the track after releasing.

Todd

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Todd KCCOAuthor

Known Participant

yeah, it's way too sloppy. If they just gave you the ability to click on the track and move it up and down, snapping it between tracks, that would be amazing. Sony Vegas had that ability 12 years ago. This is easily achievable, and is way cleaner.

DavinciWhite

Participating Frequently

So here I come with my input
but I bring no solution. Sorry!

I have three multicam theater show sessions; each of them had more or less the same arrangement of cameras, but one day we had more cameras, other day we had different settings, and so on. 8 cameras + 12 audio, more or less.

Created a timeline and made the arrangement for one of the shows: then I decided to duplicate the timeline so I can have the same cameras in place all the time. I named all Video & Audio tracks (First Cam, Sony cam, Shotgun Left, Shotgun Right, Line ... )

Is just a pity I cannot do what you have suggested... move the entire track (with all its attributes, especially with audio eq/track mixer) to another position. Now if I want to rearrange I have to add new track, rename the old track, be sure that EQ sound is correct, and so on...

I just wanted to say that some of us like to put name and eq track, and it would be an amazing feature for multicam sessions to be able to move the whole track up/down. This feature is usually available in apps for phones/tablets.

(another topic will be the option to separate the multicam preview from the monitor preview...)

Thanks for reading! And good luck with your projects.

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Todd KCCOAuthor

Known Participant

100% - Sony Vegas had this feature right from the first version of the software 20 years ago. All I had to do was click on that track header, where is says the name, solo, mute, volume... click that rectangle and pull the entire track up or down. It was a beautiful thing.
Premiere (the wanna be king of editing software) - you need to create a new track, lasso all the clips on the track you want to move, hold shift and drag up or down over another track to the new track. Now you have a blank track under where you took it from. Delete that track.
If you missed any clips, they are now gone.
As you said, if it's audio and you have track volume adjustments etc, you have to then redo those as well.

Such an easy ask... yet, 20 years in and not an option.

Todd

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Todd KCCOAuthor

Known Participant

@Ann Bens - Nah, this is not what I want. I fully understand you can shift tracks up or down, change the hierarchy easily.

I want to be able to swap tracks up or down, on top of or below other tracks easily, without having to select all the clips. Currently, if I had tracks V1,2,3,4 and I wanted to move V1 up to where V3 is and move V3 down to V1, I would have to:

Create an empty track between V2 & V3, select all the clips on V1 track, hold SHIFT, drag them up to the empty track. Then highlight the V3 track clips, hold SHIFT, and drag them to V1. If my project is long, I may have to zoom in and out to make sure I have all the clips selected, then zoom in as I shift up or down to make sure they are not shifting on the timeline.

If Adobe made the track selectable:

I click on the left in the area of where it says V1... It highlights the track, you then drag that track to V3... now your tracks are in the order of V2,V1,V3,V4. I then click the V3 track and drag it down to V1 original position, now they are V3,V2,V1,V4.

2 clicks and I've completely rearanged the hierarchy just like that. FASTER... time is money! Anything Adobe can do to speed up my time is money in my pocket.

M

markuscone

Participant

I know what you are saying. In Ableton live and most sound programs you simply click and hold the track and drag it up or down. Track 3 then becomes 5 etc.

M

Michael Grenadier

Legend

I think if we asked the programmers about this, they'd shake their heads and say it's not simple to make this happen (but what do I know). Every time you add a feature, you're creating things that can go wrong and it can be really hard to predict how well it'll function on the variety of OS's and hardware that are out there. That said, the program is so deep, that it's very easy to miss a better way to do things... so let's mark this as a great post...

D

Doctor_St@s

Participating Frequently

I think it's pretty obvious that Premiere should have such standard feature to move tracks up/down in order to change their overlay priority. To avoid "linked audio track" issue developers could just make some warning message that "You need to unlink your Video Track's audio if you want to change the Track Order".

The way it functions now is tooo clumsey IMHO. You have e.g. 3 hours project with 10 video tracks, each one consists of thousands sequences, transitions etc... You want to swap V5 and V6 because you need V5 in front of V6 in overlay order. Nowadays (if I'm not mistaken) in 2020 you have to create New empty V11, ~~hunt for red october~~ do a lot of pixel hunting, lock V1-V4, drag all other 3 hrs containments up one track with all those glitches (because it seems to be having to recalculate all previews etc.) Then you've to lock V5, V7-V11 and select and move V7 (that once was your V6) clips down to V5, then to lock it, unlock V8-V11 and all its thousands of trimmed clips, drag'em one track down and then to remove that useless V11.

Seems a bit overwhelming compared to the "track icon drag&drop" process, alas we still have to make it hard way.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Each of these post-processing apps has bits of the UI that work real well ... and some other part that is done vastly better in a different app. What the ... ? ... is the typical user response there. And you've hit one thing that seems like it should be an obvious thing, but ... obviously ... ain't for someone somewhere in development.

UserVoice is the place to go for these both to get them to the engineers (they do read them all) and they get collated and delivered to the upper managers who determine budgets.

Yea, you can move tracks the way mgrenadier notes, and after doing it a couple times, it's pretty quick ... relatively. So I imagine the engineers may be thinking there's an easy enough method that other things are more seriously in need of engineering time.

I'd rather be able to grab a track header and move it myself. Seems SO eminently logical to me ...

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

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Todd KCCOAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you for the link. I agree, it's almost like apple missing obvious everyday interface features that should have been a thing years ago. There are developers who recognize this and create apps to use those features but year after year, apple does not integrate them into the base OS.

Anyway I will now post it in user voice.

Thanks again,

S

salvo34

Inspiring

I think Mgren's last message is the best answer for you.

If you wanna make feature requests there's some link for that somewhere.

I hope you continue to come to the forums to improve the program and also maybe help others, as many have come from avid and fcp and vegas like you, and you know a lot. Thanks.

🙂

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Todd KCCOAuthor

Known Participant

I will definately ask for it as a feature request. I have done that in the past but thought I'd see if was actually a thing first.

Like maybe all I had to do was to hold option and do it lol.

There are sooooooo many time saving things that you kind of happen upon or you see in a tutorial and you're like damn, I've been doing it the long way the whole time.

I appreciate your responses. Thank you for taking the time.

Ann Bens

Correct answer

Community Expert

Select Track Selection Forward Tool (A).

Hold down Ctrl and click on first clip

Drag everthing up or down (dont let go of the ctrl) to new empty track.

M

Michael Grenadier

Legend

don't detect any snarkiness in your posts... and always a good idea to tell us what your experience level is. I understand what you're saying and can never hurt to post your frustration in case you're missing something. Wondering if there's a way to edit your sequence into a new sequence (not as a nest but actually using the source clips). Think there used to be a way to do that in fcp7. Anyone?

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