/ ROAD TO PROTOOLS

7. Zooming

Zooming is very useful to make precise edits. Being able to quickly zoom in and out on a selection of clips, will massively speed up your workflow. Let’s have at look at the zooming possibilities within Pro Tools.

hotkeys used in this post
Zooming    
ALT + F   zoom horizontal on clip
ALT + A   zoom out and show the full session
E   toggle zoom on selection
T   zoom in (zooms in on the location of your playhead)
R   zoom out

Toggle zoom

Toggle zoom is probably one of my favourite hotkeys in Pro Tools. You select a couple of clips with the ‘selector tool’ hit E and you’re able to quickly do your edits. Once you’re done hit E again and you’re back to full view.

Horizontal zoom

Like in most DAWs you’re able to zoom horizontal zoom by holding the ALT key and then use your scroll wheel. If you have zoomed in a little bit too much and e.g. a clip is just outside of your screen, you can move your view to the left or right by holding the SHIFT key and then use your scrollwheel.

Tip 1: Holding ALT and scrolling to the left or right will in/decrease the size of the wavform. Note that this will NOT make the wavform louder. I often make the wavform a little bigger when I want a better look at where clicks and pops are in a recording, so that I can remove them quickly.

Tip 2: When some people record something in PT for the first time, they think they’ve put on way too much gain because the wavforms are so big. Often they’re gaining fine, but they just need to zoom out a little bit.


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jasper

Jasper Hartsuijker

My name is Jasper and I'm the founder of this blog. I work as audio engineer / producer at IAM STUDIOS (Amsterdam) and teach music production at the University of Arts in Utrecht. I also love to write code and make educational content.

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