"Toggle Transform Direct Manipulation" Keyboard Shortcut Inconsistency

[ThioJoe]

I'm not sure if this is a problem with my environment or what, but I'm having trouble with the "Toggle Transform Direct Manipulation" and "Toggle Crop Direct Manipulation" keyboard shortcuts apparently when assigned to specific keys.

If no one else can reproduce it then it's probably something on my end 🤔

TL;DR: Basically the "G" key without modifiers (not sure about any other keys) doesn't seem to work to toggle direct manipulation modes from the timeline - the program monitor panel must be active for it to work. See screen recording below for better example of what I mean.

What does not work (specific details):

• With either the "Toggle Transform Direct Manipulation" or "Toggle Crop Direct Manipulation" keyboard command assigned to the "G" key with no modifiers, if I try to use the shortcut specifically with just the clip selected in the timeline (so the program monitor isn't active), it doesn't toggle the direct manipulation mode.
  • However either command (transform or crop toggle) DOES work if it's assigned to G with a modifier like Shift+G

What does always work:

• Clicking the actual "toggle" button in the program monitor panel, not using the keyboard shortcut, always works
• With the program monitor panel active / selected, the keyboard shortcut always works, regardless of the assignment (whether the key is assigned with modifiers, or not)
• If the command is assigned to seemingly most other letter keys such as I or O
• If either command is assigned with a modifier, such as Shift+G, it does work.

Below is a screen recording. Here's some notes on what I'm showing at different parts:

• 0:00-0:05: Pressing the "G" key with the program monitor active/selected, and the direct manipulation mode toggles as expected
• 0:05-0:10: With the clip selected in the timeline, but the program monitor not active, I'm again pressing the G key but it is not doing anything.
• 0:17 - 0:022: Showing the G key assignment to Toggle Transform Direct Manipulation
• 0:25 - 0:27: Showing that I also have the I and O keys assigned to the same command for the next demonstration
• 0:29 - 0:34: Pressing the I and O assignments DO work, unlike the G key for some reason

These are my assignments to G:

And as you can see there's no timeline panel specific assignment to G:

System Info:

• Premiere Pro Version 25.0.0 (Build 61)
• Sequence Settings: Doesn't seem to matter, it happens regardless of sequence settings
• Windows 11 24H2 (Build 26100.2161)
• System Hardware:
  • CPU: Intel 12900K
  • GPU: Nvidia 4090 FE
  • GPU Driver Version: 565.90 (Current latest studio driver)
  • RAM: 128GB
  • Storage: NVMe SSD - Optane 905P 1.5TB

[Rach McIntire]

Hi @ThioJoe  ,

Welcome to the Premiere Pro forums! We are glad to see you here. You've given us a lot of great information.  We need a few more details to try to help with the issue. Please see, How do I write a bug report?

Thanks for submitting your bug report. I hope we can help you soon. Sorry for the frustration! 

Thanks,
Rach

[ThioJoe]

Ah right, I forgot to include the info about the system. I've added that to the bottom of the post.

[ThioJoe]

Ok I actually figured out the problem and was able to fix it (it had to do with a problem with my .kys keyboard shortcut file), and I think I even know the root cause. And it does indeed appear to be a bug.

Summary of the bug and cause (full details after):

For context, I previously had the G key bound to the previous equivalent of the direct manipulation command in Premiere version 24.0 (where it would activate the transform controls in the program monitor). This command, the "cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation" entry in the .kys file, appears to have been migrated from being a "timeline" context control in Version 24.0, to a "global" control in 25.0. But the timeline-level bind in the kys XML file doesn't seem to have been removed during the upgrade, and I guess that timeline context command doesn't do anything anymore. Since any more specific context overrides the global, that means that the non-functional timeline command would appear to block any command, even itself assigned at the global level!

------------------------------------------------------

Investigation - How I Figured It Out:

• First through some testing, I realized that if I set the Keyboard Shortcuts profile/preset to the default one (called "Adobe Premiere Pro Default" in the preset dropdown in the "Keyboard Shortcuts" menu), if I then set the same 'G' key to the direct transformation command, it worked fine! When switching back to my custom profile, again it wouldn't work.
• So to remove all doubt, I installed Premiere Pro on an absolutely fresh Windows virtual machine, with no extensions or anything. The 'G' key would work fine when bound to the direct transformation command, so then I copied over my seemingly-problematic .kys profile to the VM, and set that fresh install of Premiere Pro to use it, and same exact problem!
• I also realized that when setting the 'G' key to other commands like 'Audio Gain', that would also not work, so it wasn't just the manipulation commands.
• So clearly the problem was with the .kys file itself somehow

The Fix:

Looking in the .kys file, i found that the command in question was "cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation". And I could see that the command appears in two places (like many commands do in the .kys file) in two "contexts", one for 'global' and one for 'timeline'. Below is those entries isolated to show the contexts they're in, but in reality the kys file has many entries for keys above and below each.

<context.global Version="1">
			<item.611 Version="1">
				<virtualkey>2147483719</virtualkey>
				<modifier.ctrl>false</modifier.ctrl>
				<modifier.alt>false</modifier.alt>
				<modifier.shift>false</modifier.shift>
				<commandname>cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation</commandname>
			</item.611>
</context.global>
			
<context.timeline Version="1">			
			<item.77 Version="1">
				<virtualkey>2147483719</virtualkey>
				<modifier.ctrl>false</modifier.ctrl>
				<modifier.alt>false</modifier.alt>
				<modifier.shift>false</modifier.shift>
				<commandname>cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation</commandname>
			</item.77>
</context.timeline>

(For those curious, the virtual key value of "2147483719" corresponds to the G key. If you convert the number to hex, it is "80000047", where the 'high bit' of 47 corresponds to the "virtual key" hex code for G, which is 47. Not sure why some keys are stored like this and others just have the exact virtual key hex number).

I then compared those entries to another Test kys profile that was working with the 'G' key bound to the command, and in that working one, the entries looked like this:

<context.global Version="1">
			<item.608 Version="1">
				<virtualkey>2147483719</virtualkey>
				<modifier.ctrl>false</modifier.ctrl>
				<modifier.alt>false</modifier.alt>
				<modifier.shift>false</modifier.shift>
				<commandname>cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation</commandname>
			</item.608>
</context.global>


<context.timeline Version="1">				
			<item.76 Version="1">
				<commandname>cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation</commandname>
			</item.76>
</context.timeline>

The Solution: I simply removed the following 4 lines only from the "timeline" context entry of the 'bad' kys file, so it looked like the working one (So only the 'item' and 'commandname' lines were still there):

<virtualkey>2147483719</virtualkey>
<modifier.ctrl>false</modifier.ctrl>
<modifier.alt>false</modifier.alt>
<modifier.shift>false</modifier.shift>

After that, where the "global" context entry was the only one, and the "timeline" context entry was empty, now the command worked as expected. It also fixed the behavior of any other command assigned to that key. 

The Cause:

I then had a hunch, where I went on the virtual machine where I copied the 'bad' kys file, tried removing the 'G' keybind for the bad profile, and realized Premiere was not removing the "timeline" context entry for the manipulation command, only the global entry. It also appears that the manipulation command ID "cmd.timeline.show.direct.clip.manipulation" is the same as what it was in version 24.0, and G is the key I had that command assigned to, which must not be a coincidence. I believe in the process of 25.0 upgrading the .kys file, it probably didn't remove the "timeline" context entry for the command, which was meant to be migrated to the global context. But since the now-non-functional timeline entry was still there, it was blocking the global version of itself.

[Rach McIntire]

Nice job @ThioJoe .  Glad you found the solution.  Thanks for using the the Premiere Pro Forums.

[ThioJoe]

Right but to be clear it's still apparently an actual bug in Premiere that needs to be addressed.

Because anyone who had the keybind assigned in version 24.0 won't be able to use that key as a keybind in version 25.0.

What I posted is more of a workaround, not sure it should be tagged as "fixed".

[Rach McIntire]

updating status