Solo a Video Layer in Premiere

VicDiGital

Use case: I'm editing a short music video where the client shot the full song seventeen times, so it's seventeen layers. Too many for me to do a multicam sequence. What I'll be doing manually is either turning off all the layers above the layer I want to currently select a piece from, or I'll move that clip to the top layer, select what I want to use, then move it back down to where it was. Both are various levels of hassle.
So is there a way to create a series of shortcuts that turn off the visibility for ALL the layers except the selected layer (or selected and below)? In this scenario, I'd have to have, say, 20 such shortcut keys, one for each potential layer I'd want to solo.

Or maybe is there a way to just have one shortcut key, but where you can type in the number of the layer you want to be visible?

Or is there a more obvious way to accomplish this than I'm currently thinking?

NLE_Ninja

VicDiGital Yes. Map a shortcut for the Excalibur command Solo Mute Tracks

VicDiGital

Thanks, but that's audio. I'm talking about video layers.

Sir_Ivan

VicDiGital this command works both for Audio and Video tracks:
https://manuscript.knightsoftheeditingtable.com/extensions/excalibur/commands/sequence#solo-mute-tracks

You can create user command based on it, where you will select only Video Tracks option 😉

VicDiGital

As far as I can tell, there's not a command for turning a layer's visibility on or off, at least one that can be mapped to a shortcut or added as a command in Excalibur.

NLE_Ninja

VicDiGital I’d check the Excalibur settings to make sure because I was able to map a shortcut to it.

NLE_Ninja

Sir_Ivan was about to say the same thing but Sir Ivan beat me to it. One of my most used Excalibur commands and mapped a keyboard shortcut to it as soon as I saw what it did. A real timesaver in my workflow.

VicDiGital

Thanks. Didn't see the option to apply it to video until making a user command. That'll work!

If someone else hasn't suggested it, someone needs to put together a video aggregating all the best Excalibur commands and suggested shortcut key combinations. Yeah, you can do it as just a pdf or something, but it wasn't until I saw the video of this in action that I jumped on board literally 30 seconds later and purchased this.

Maybe there can be a Ranker or something, where everyone can put up an Excalibur command they use or they've made, and we can see which ones bubble to the top as most useful to the most people.

Combine this with an Elgato Streamdeck or TouchPortal and it's almost like having a new editing system. But you guys know that. I just feel like I'm probably missing out on so many amazing solutions being used with Excalibur simply because I'm not looking in the right place, or not reading a forum post correctly to realize how useful that some command might be to my workflow.

NLE_Ninja

VicDiGital That might be something I might give a try in the coming months. Excalibur has been worth every penny and changed my workflow for the better