Shortcut is a small bar you dock inside Premiere Pro, where each button does one tedious job instantly. It is free, with no subscription and no payment, and it works in After Effects too.
It is built to feel like part of Premiere rather than a plugin bolted on. It follows your dark or light mode, and it is meant to be small enough that you park it beside the timeline and forget it is a separate thing.
Getting it
Head to Filmit.io, create an account, and download Filmit Studio, our free desktop app. Install it, open Premiere Pro, and go to Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio. Your tools are in the panel, and there is a free section. Open Shortcut and dock it.
Adjustment layers, four ways
You can make an adjustment layer in Premiere already. Right click in the project panel, new adjustment layer, drag it to the timeline, size it. That is fine once. It is not fine on every project.
With Shortcut selected clips drive it. Click one clip and hit the button and you get an adjustment layer above that clip. Select several and you get one spanning the selection.
Shift click and you get one adjustment layer per clip instead of one across the lot. Ctrl click and you get one over every cut in the selection, with a padding value you set in settings so each one sits across the join the way you want.
Staircase, for sync that actually runs
This is the one that saves real time. If you have a pile of clips sitting on one track and you want Premiere to synchronize them, you cannot just select them and run Synchronize. Every clip needs its own track first.
Moving two clips onto their own tracks by hand is easy enough. Doing it for twelve is miserable.
Select the footage and click staircase, and Shortcut spreads every clip onto its own track. Now select the lot, right click, Synchronize, and Premiere lines them up. When you are done, click un-staircase and everything packs back down onto the lowest free tracks, ready to trim.
Un-nest
You nested a group of clips and now you need at what is inside. Click the un-nest button and the nested sequence is replaced by the clips that were in it, in place.
Deeply nested arrangements can get complicated, so if you hit an edge case where the layers do not land where you expect, send it to us and we will fix it.
A freeze frame that behaves
Premiere has add frame hold, and it works, but it freezes the clip from that point down and it is rarely quite what you wanted.
Shortcut takes the frame under your playhead and puts it on the track above as a still. You do not even need to select the clip first. The clip underneath keeps playing normally, and you can stretch the still as long as you need, which makes it far easier to work with than a hold applied to the clip itself.
QC before you export
Gaps and offline media are the things you find at the worst possible moment. A gap can be a single frame wide, invisible unless you zoom right in. A clip can go offline without you noticing until the export.
Click QC and Shortcut markers up what it finds: gaps in your video tracks and offline or missing media. You get a list of things to fix while you can still fix them, rather than discovering them in the render or, worse, after delivery.
Built to disappear into Premiere
Shortcut is meant to feel like part of the application rather than a guest in it. It follows your dark or light mode, it docks like any other panel, and it is small enough to sit permanently beside the timeline without eating space you need for the edit.
That is the whole design brief. A shortcut that you have to go and find is not a shortcut. It has to be sitting there, one click away, at the moment you would otherwise start digging through a menu.
One panel, two applications
The same panel runs in After Effects, and it knows which application it is in. Premiere gets the sequence tools, After Effects gets the comp tools, and the shared buttons behave the same in both so your muscle memory carries across.
In practice that means adjustment layers, freeze frames, and the QC scan work wherever you are, while staircase, un-staircase, and un-nest are Premiere concepts and stay on the Premiere side.
Where it earns its space
Multicam and sync prep is the clearest case. Spreading a dozen clips onto their own tracks so Synchronize will run, then packing them back down afterwards, is pure mechanical work with no craft in it at all. Two clicks either side of the job removes it entirely.
Delivery is the other one. Running a QC scan before you export takes a second and turns invisible problems into markers you can act on. A one frame gap or a clip that quietly went offline is exactly the kind of thing that survives an entire edit and then shows up in the render.
What it leaves in your project
Everything Shortcut makes is a normal Premiere object. Adjustment layers, stills on a track, markers, clips arranged on tracks. Nothing depends on the plugin still being installed, so a project can go to an assistant, a colourist, or a client with no expectation that they have anything from us.
A note on undo
After Effects lets us wrap each shortcut in a single undo group, so one undo reverses the whole action. Premiere has no equivalent, so a shortcut that rearranges several tracks there may take a few presses to walk all the way back. Worth knowing before you staircase twenty clips and change your mind.
Tell us what to build next
There is empty space on the bar on purpose. The buttons that are there came from jobs the team kept doing by hand, and the next ones should come from yours.
You can reach us from the settings menu in the panel, which links out to our Discord and Reddit, or through contact support in your Filmit Studio profile. A short description of the job and how you do it now is plenty to go on.
Free, and taking requests
Shortcut is completely free. There is also space left on the bar on purpose. If there is a repetitive job in your Premiere workflow that belongs here, tell us in the comments, join the Discord or Reddit from the settings menu, or send a feature request through contact support in your Filmit Studio profile.
