simple commands take several seconds to process ^^ That's murderously inefficient. You can improve performance quite a lot if you put your footage onto an SSD. They're not too expensive these days. And if time is money, you'll ultimately save both. You can also try putting your Program monitor's preview resolution to 1/2 or 1/4. But the best option, would be to use Premiere's built in proxy workflow to create cineform (.mov) previews. Then turn on "Toggle proxies," and enjoy a buttery smooth timeline experience. Of course, you need a CPU and GPU that aren't totally crap. What are your system specs? As for your opacity / masking / cross dissolve issues.... know that Premiere does not play nice if you use those things all at the same time. Especially if you throw blend modes into the mix. And lumetri color effects. The solution is to pre-compose. In Premiere, it's called "nesting." Look it up. But sometimes even that does not work. In those cases, rather than nesting, you should just render a small clip. You'll need to set some in/out points, and render a small section of your timeline at full resolution. (I prefer to use cineform for this.) Then, import that clip and put it on a top layer. (I also prefer to disable the clips on the layers below that were rendered.) Now, everything is flattened and great. You can add more effects and weird transitions and opacity thingies, and premiere won't get confused, because it's working with a plain video again. ... View more

oook, so I have 4 monitors on my system, some with different UI scaling. I've noticed similar behavior, where the color the eye dropper tool selects is not accurate. however, it is not always black. it is just a color that is half a screen away from where it should be. Because I have a cursor click visualization script, I can see what part of the screen premiere is ACTUALLY sampling color from. Try click+dragging your cursor from the eyedropper, all around the screen and watching the color change. is it ever anything other than black? ... View more

AUTOHOTKEY IS YOUR FRIEND! I had the same problem with zooming in and out of the program monitor. The built-in shortcuts only work when the program monitor is "active" or "in focus." Here is the script I wrote to fix my problem. Basiclaly, when I hit 0 on the numpad, several different keyboard macros are immediately triggered: numpad0:: Send ^!+7 ;-----------------------ctrl alt shift 7 - set in premiere to bring focus to the effects panel, in order to "clear" the current focus, wherever it might be Send ^!+4 ;-----------------------ctrl alt shift 4 - set in premiere to highlight the program monitor send ^{numpadEnter} ;--------set in premiere to "zoom to fit" (program monitor) Send ^!+0 ;-----------------------ctrl alt shift 0 - - set in premiere to highlight the timeline (where i probably was when this process began) return So for you, your code would be something like: F1:: Send ^!+7 Send ^!+0 sleep 10 ;this will wait 10 milliseconds for Premiere to catch up a bit Send j sleep 10 Send ^+!m ;shortcut set in premiere to highlight the "Markers" panel return F2:: Send ^!+7 Send ^!+0 sleep 10 Send k sleep 10 Send ^+!m return F3:: Send ^!+7 Send ^!+0 sleep 10 Send l sleep 10 Send ^+!m return I don't have a dedicated tutorial for introducing new people to programming autohotkey for Premiere, but this one is pretty simple and should be enough to get you started: Premiere Pro -- "ripple delete clip at playhead" made possible with Autohotkey! - YouTube As much as you may cringe at the idea of doing your own scripting (as many do) I can tell you that the time spent learning this stuff will pay off in spades. Not only can you make up for some of the missing features in Premiere, but also in literally any other desktop application you like. ... View more