From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

Trim with the Smart tool - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

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Trim with the Smart tool

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- [Narrator] In addition to using the smart tool to select clip segments and move them around inside your sequence, you can also use it to immediately get hold of trim handles for those clip segments. As we've seen already, when you're adding a clip to a sequence, you may not use the entire original master clip. It's quite possible that you're going to add in and out marks maybe here, for example, if I add an in and an out, I'm just taking about one third of the clip. The leftover media associated with a clip is still available once you've added it to your sequence. This section, before the in mark, and the section after the out mark, these two sections are referred to as handles and it's a term that dates back to celluloid film editing, where the section you don't need is the bit that you'd hold onto. You don't want to risk getting fingerprints on the important part of the media, and so these leftover sections are called handles. In a non-linear editing system, the handles are every bit as available as the content that you chose. I'm going to put my playhead right at the end of my sequence here, I'm going check my track patching, and I'm going to splice in, actually it doesn't really matter if I splice in or overwrite, because it's at the end of the sequence. I've just taken the section between the in and out marks on the clip, but with my smart tool enabled, I can decide if I want to adjust the in and out marks that I applied. I'm going to click into the timeline window here just to make sure it's active, and now you'll notice if I have the playhead at the top of the clip I get the red leftover override option for segments the bottom of the clip, it's the extract splicing mode. But if I move towards the cut point, I get a red trim icon, or a yellow trim icon. You can probably guess what these two icons do. But to illustrate, I'm going to use this clip just before it on the timeline. If I use the red trim mode to click and drag the end of this clip back, it's a little bit like folding back a map, or rolling up a manuscript. I'm going to click and drag left, and as I do, I'm going to leave a gap behind. As I do this, and before I release the mouse button, you can see the composer window has switched to a trim mode. When I release the mouse, it will stay in that mode with this trim roller in place. If the trim roller is red, then the trim adjustment that you apply will function like a left over right adjustment. I can click and drag to the right and I'm just laying over the top of the filler and I can click and drag to the left and I'm leaving a gap behind. What's important about this trimming mode, is that any clips further down the timeline, or further to the right on the timeline, are unaffected, they don't move. If I click and drag further over, you'll notice that my trimming is blocked. Actually, in this case, it looks like it's blocked by the end of the media. Let's find that out. I'm going to deselect, I'm going to hold down command and alt so that I can catch the last frame of this clip, and then I'm going to press my match frame keyboard shortcut, which is y on my keyboard, to find this frame in my source monitor. And what do you know, it is indeed the last frame of the clip. So let's test this out. Back in my timeline, I'm going to move my smart tool down to the lower half of the clip, I'm going to move over to the right until I get a yellow trim icon, and now I'm going to click and drag to the left. You can immediately see what's happening. Just as you'd expect, this yellow mode of editing does not leave a gap. So I'm going to release the mouse and, of course, because our timeline is set to auto zoom, it kind of looks like perhaps nothing happened. But that's just because we've zoomed in a little bit to make the maximum use of the timeline window. I think it's better to illustrate this with a clearer zoom, so I'm going to zoom manually, here we go, so that we can see the adjustments. So again I'm going to click and drag left, and you can see my timeline get shorter. This is very much like extracting a piece of a clip using in and out marks, but you've got really fine control. If I switch now, to the red mode, which I can do just by clicking at the top half of the clip, and drag to the right, notice what's happening to the clip at the end of the sequence. I'm just writing over the top of it. When I release the mouse, I've actually overwritten part of that next clip. And again, if I drag to the right, I'm reducing the content that's there, and if I drag to the left, you notice that the second clip will just restore itself back to the point it was before I began this particular trimming operation. So we were about there, we can trim over the clip, but I haven't released the mouse yet, and when I trim back to the left, course I haven't applied that adjustment and so the clip is restored, but when I release the mouse button now I've left again. I'm conscious that as we've been through each of the tools, and we've looked at each of the different editing operations, it might seem like a lot of different ways of adding and removing contents on the timeline. But, essentially, there are just two approaches. It's either going to shuffle things around or it's not. And you can choose using the smart tool simply by positioning your cursor at the top or the bottom of a clip. I'm going to deselect again and this time I'm going to just make sure my timeline window is active and instead of clicking to the left of a cut, or to the right, I'm going to click right in the middle. And now, regardless of whether I click at the top or the bottom, I've got a dual-roller trim. And this means if I click and drag in either direction, I'm adding content to one clip while removing it from the other and the net duration of my sequence doesn't change. So, you can see the clip on the left is getting shorter as the clip on the right is getting longer and when I release the mouse, there's no issue with the sync, I'm just changing the timing of the cut. This is called a dual-roller trim. I'm just going to deselect again. Notice if I want to, I can also, let me just click in so the timeline is active, I can also click on filler and trim that, but I've got a problem. I've just trimmed the video and I've left the audio behind because I didn't have my audio one track turned on. So, I'm going to undo, turn on A1, and let's try that again. Notice that other tracks with filler will automatically just pad out to fill the gap if you create one. So, these are the ways you can use the smart tool to quickly dive in and change the timing of your edits. Just make sure the timeline window is active and look carefully at the icon you get before you click.

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