Welcome to Tool Tip Tuesday for Adobe Premiere Pro on ProVideo Coalition. Every week, we will share a new tooltip to save time when working in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Do you have a return key on your keyboard? Of course, you do. Have you ever accidentally hit the return key while working in the Adobe Premiere Pro timeline, and either the play head jumped to an early point in the timeline or Premiere starts rendering?

That’s because the return key on your keyboard is mapped by default to Render Effects in Work Area. 

This is a keyboard shortcut from a bygone age in Premiere when you often had to render clips with motion or effects applied just to get smooth playback. Modern computers are much more powerful and can often play back many complex effects in real-time without the need to render for playback.

How do you remove Render Effects in Work Area from the return key? Just like you remove any keyboard shortcut (or key bind as some folks call it).

First, open the Keyboard Shortcuts tool (that’s option+command+K on a Mac, CTRL on a PC) and click on the return key. In the lower right part of the Keyboard Shortcuts tool, you see every command that is currently assigned to that key, modifiers and all. Click the tiny little x next to any shortcut to remove the shortcut from that key.

It’s that easy. Now, you can remap any shortcut to the return key. Personally, I keep this key unmapped but will occasionally map it to a shortcut I feel like I have to use a lot in a short period of time. It’s kind of like My Friend F13, but I’ve settled on that as an extended edit shortcut.

Bonus tip: If you still have the work area bar turned on but either don’t use it or don’t know what it is used for, you can turn that off and reclaim just a tiny bit of timeline real estate. Just head under the timeline hamburger menu and uncheck Work Area Bar and the Work Area Bar will go away.

The Work Area Bar was useful long ago when you had to do a lot of rendering for smooth playback. Years ago, Adobe finally let us turn that thing off since it really only got in the way.

Now, get to remapping that keyboard to more useful keys!

This series is courtesy of Adobe.