Pretrim your media in the clip monitor

Often you've got a very long clip in your movie, but you only want to use a short segment of it, or you want to take a long segment and use it as several short clips. The Clip monitor is a separate monitor panel for previewing and even pre-trimming your clips before you add them to your timeline. So for instance, if you got an especially long clip and you only want to use a short segment from it, the clip monitor can be an invaluable tool. Now when we're Expert mode, if we go to Project assets and select a clip and double click on it, it opens in the Clip monitor.

Some people call this the Preview monitor, some people call it the Trimmer. But it is a place where we can pre-trim our clip before we add it to our timeline. You can see in the lower right hand corner of this panel, that this clip is two and a half minutes long, or two minutes and forty five seconds long. We only want to use a short portion of it, and in fact if I scrub through here you can see that this clip shows long shots, close-ups, some things where we can see the farmer's face, some things where we can't; I only want a short segment in here that actually shows this farmer's face. So I'm going to position my play head at the point on this little timeline, where I can see the farmer's face, and where I'd like my clip to begin, right there.

Now I can set my in point a number of ways. I can either just simply click on the button there that says Set in point. At'll work; Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to undo that. I can drag on the Endpoint here, just drag it to the position; now that's my in point; Ctrl+z or Cmd+Z to undo that. Or I can simply press I on my keyboard. That becomes now my in point. I'd like this clip to end when we come back away from this close up of the farmer, right about there.

And the same thing, I can either click on Set Out, to change the out point; I can manually drag the outpoint in, or I can simply press the O on my keyboard. So in and out, I and O. And now I've created a short segment of my clip. And if I drag it to my timeline, you see that the only portion, I'm going to move this off to the side so you can see it, you see that the only portion of that two minute and forty five second clip that comes to that timeline, is the portion that's in that live area, that light blue area of my clip.

That's great. If I've got a clip that's five minutes long and I only want to use 10 seconds of it, I don't have to drag a five-minute clip down to the timeline, and then do all this trimming here to try to find the exact spot. Instead, I can pretrim it before I add it to the timeline. But there's one more cool thing about pre-trimming your clips. In this particular clip, I have a number of sequences all in the same clip. I have this shot here of the vegetables, I have a shot of the farmer. I go out farther, I have a long shot of him working in the field. To me, that's actually three, at least three separate clips.

I can save these trim segments back as sub-clips. To do that I open up the Project Assets Panel again. Now this will only work in List View, so if you happen to be in Grid View, you're going to have to switch to List View to do this. And I can drag this clip from the Clip monitor back into the Project assets panel and it will come in as a new clip. I can call this 4B, and I can reset for close up of the vegetables here, and I can drag that into my Project assets panel; let's call that 4B.

I am simply clicking on the name by the way, and that makes it available for you to change or rename the file. And then finally, we got a long shot of our farmer in the field. We'll set our in point and our out point. Drag that into project assets and we can call that 4C. Now, what we've done is greatly simplified our work. Suppose we had some real long segments here, and we want to use them as if they're individual scenes. By saving them as sub-clips, I've now made it much simpler for me to locate just the part of the clip that I want to use in my movie, whether it's a close-up of the farmer, a close up of the vegetables, or a long shot of the field.

Very, very cool tool. Now the one thing about the Clip monitor that kind of drives people crazy sometimes is that it will always pop up when you double-click on a clip, it will always pop-up right in the center of your work space like this. If you'd like, if you're like me, you may just want to put it off to the side here or rearrange the other panels to allow space for it. So you can just always leave it open, and it will remain in the same spot as you're working. Oh, there's one other way to pre-trim your clips, by the way, and that is using the Auto-analyzer.

Let's go up to our starting clip here, the one that we first used for three and four. If I right click on it and I select Run Auto analyzer, watch what happens. The program will run through it and it will automatically create subclips for us, based on the context. Watch this. There we go. In it's auto analysis it created a subfolder in here. When I open up the subfolder, these are, take a look at the Clip monitor. You can see these are automatically trimmed segments from the longer clip based on the changing content of the clip.

Is that not cool? That the program does automatically for you. So the Clip monitor is both a great way to preview clips before you use them in your movie. It's also a dynamic work space in which you can prepare your scene and pre-trim your scenes, so that the only part of the clip that you add to your timeline is the part you actually need.