Using "Move Playhead to Cursor" is not nearly as responsive as normal scrubbing

[ThioJoe]

Context: Normally to drag the playhead around you have to click and drag on the region at the top of the timeline that has the timecode. But there is also an option to bind a keyboard shortcut to the action "Move Playhead to Cursor", which can be activated anywhere in the timeline.

However, I've noticed problems with this action.

1. You can't really use this action and then continue to hold to keep scrubbing the playhead. If you click and hold the bound shortcut while moving the mouse within the timeline, for several moments the playhead will usually just stick there where you initially clicked. Basically negating any time savings of just moving the cursor to the regular scrubbing location (if you intend to continuously scrub).

2. Even if you keep holding the shortcut until the playhead starts "following" the mouse cursor, it seems to update the playhead position way less frequently than normal dragging the top of the timeline, kind of making it useless. 

Here are some clips to demonstrate what I mean.

Expected Behavior: Normal regular playhead scrubbing via top of timeline. Here I am moving the cursor back and forth, and if I left click and hold while doing so, the playhead follows fine:

Below I use the keyboard bound action to try the same thing, but you can see the playhead just sticks there, despite me holding the key. If held long enough it starts following, other times if held for some intermediate time, it seems to then jump to the mouse position when releasing the shortcut instead (like around the 5 second mark). 
Starting at around 0:12, I click then drag back and forth rapidly, and you can see it sort of follows, but lags greatly behind and not updating very frequently. Compare this to around 0:19 where I do the same thing in the timeline bar and it is way more responsive, which is how I want the other way to be as well.

Not sure if this is exactly a "bug", but it definitely dramatically reduces the usefulness of the feature.

[andrey_skripnik]

It's actually a mistery to me, that it scrubs perfectly smooth on my friend's macbook. The same macbook model, the same project, the same premiere version. I can't get my head around it.

[Tom_edit]

The reason you're seeing it stick/lag behind is because the shortcut is only intended to be a singular move of the playhead and so you're relying on windows repeating the key input to do the rest (which as I'm sure you know has an initial delay, and also doesnt repeat all that frequently). It'd be sweet if there was a similar hotkey that moved and continued moving the playhead until key release though.

Alternatively your best bet outside that is something like ahk (example vid). TaranVH has a v1 script for this, I have one for v2 that expands functionality and catches more edge cases but it relies on other things in my repo and a few other external libs/tools, so isn't really easy to pass off. It's not a perfect solution and still suffers from some visual lag compared to left click dragging as prem will only actually move the playhead every 30-50ms~ (guestimation), but it's a lot more useful than waiting for key repeating

edit: also apologies, I only just realised this post got necro'd somewhat

[andrey_skripnik]

As you don't believe me,  I uploaded the video from my colleague, who isn't experiencing any lag when pressing and holding "Move Playhead to Cursor". Again, same macbook model, same project, same premiere version.

[MyerPj]

You know you don't have to click and drag, you can simply click up there to where you want the playhead to be.

[andrey_skripnik]

@MyerPj the thread is specifically about the responsiveness of ‘Move Playhead to Cursor,’ as mentioned in the title

[MyerPj]

Got it, cheers. 🙂

[ThioJoe]

The reason you're seeing it stick/lag behind is because the shortcut is only intended to be a singular move of the playhead and so you're relying on windows repeating the key input to do the rest (which as I'm sure you know has an initial delay, and also doesnt repeat all that frequently).

By @Tom_edit 

Ah that explains it! Not sure how I never put two-and-two together with that. They should really add custom handling for that hotkey in particular to support press and hold. 

I created my own little Autohotkey function for it - I have the shortcut assigned to my mouse side button (which I programmed in Logitech's software to natively output an F15 keypress). So this just makes it immediately start repeating the keypress instead of waiting for Windows:

~F15::
{
	While GetKeyState("F15", "P") ; P to ensure it uses physical key state
	{
		SendInput("{F15 down}")
		Sleep(30)
	}
	SendInput("{F15 Up}")
}

In my main autohotkey script I have running all the time, since I use my side mouse button for other stuff, I have that assignment under this section which does some checks to make sure it only applies when Premiere is the active window, but also only if the mouse is specifically over the timeline panel (using a custom "CheckMouseOverControlAdvanced" function I have):

#HotIf WinActive("ahk_exe Adobe Premiere Pro.exe") and CheckMouseOverControlAdvanced("ahk_exe Adobe Premiere Pro.exe", "DroverLord - Window Class*", 3300)

The `CheckMouseOverControlAdvanced` function is in my own Utils.ahk script here: https://github.com/ThioJoe/ThioJoe-AHK-Scripts/blob/89e65913bfd8b282c4914300d35a3c7733f6f9d8/Scripts...

That function basically lets me check if the current control under the mouse is larger than a certain width, so since the timeline panel in premiere is going to be the longest I can basically check if it's over it by that.

[jamieclarke]

Hi @ThioJoe -  Thanks for submitting your bug report. We need a few more details to try to help with the issue.
Please see, How do I write a bug report?

What version of Premiere Pro are you using?  What are your computer specs?  I can't repro this laggy playhead in Premiere Pro 25.1.

Sorry for the frustration.

[ThioJoe]

@jamieclarke  I'll put my system info below - it seems to occur only on Windows. 

However @Tom_edit was able to identify the root cause. The "Move Playhead to Cursor" command is apparently not programmed as a "press and hold" command, but rather responds only to individual keydown events. So the "delay" is simply the set time between when Windows starts doing the key repeat after holding down a key.

(Behind the scenes when a key is held down in Windows, it sends the WM_KEYDOWN "message" to the Window, and if the user doesn't release the key, it waits a time set by the user, then starts sending additional keydown messages at the defined rate, until the user releases the key after which Windows sends the WM_KEYUP message and stops repeating the key.)

So what I described as "lag" and "not updating frequently" after the initial delay was actually because the Windows repeat key rate is not very high.

So basically I think that particular shortcut command should be programmed in such a way where it continuously updates the playhead position instead of needing to wait for individual keydown events.

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

System Info:

• Premiere Pro Version 25.2.0 (Build 147)
• Windows 11 24H2 (Build 26100.3476)
• Sequence Settings: Doesn't seem to matter, it happens regardless of sequence settings
• System Hardware:
  • CPU: Intel 13900KS
  • GPU: Nvidia 5090 FE
  • GPU Driver Version: 572.83 (Current latest studio driver)
  • RAM: 128GB
  • Storage: NVMe SSD - Optane 905P 1.5TB