From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

Trimming, splitting, and rippling clips

From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

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Trimming, splitting, and rippling clips

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- [Male Instructor] When you're editing in Premiere Elements, the vast majority of what you'll be doing is well, editing. You're going to be adding clips to your timeline, removing things you don't want, and then arranging what's left into an order that most effectively tells your story. Now, in this session we'll look at how to trim and how to split your clips. We're also going to look at the timeline's ripple feature and how to make it work to your advantage. To add a clip to your timeline here in expert view, simple enough, you just drag it from the Project Assets panel to the timeline. You'll notice that there are tracks that are open, in other words, that you can see the entire thumbnail in, and see the waveform for the audio. And there are tracks that are closed. Where you just see sort of a marker that indicates there's a clip there. You can open those up if you'd like. They're just closed to save some vertical space. Let me just add one more clip to the timeline. And once again, our views of the timeline can be controlled using the plus and minus keys that are up near the Backspace key, or the Backslash key, right above the Return or Enter key on your keyboard, to expand your clips so that they fill the entire timeline. Just ways to zoom in and out, doesn't change the movie itself, it's just your view of the timeline. Sometimes you want to be close, sometimes you want to be further back. To split a clip, in other words to slice it in half, you position the CTI where you'd like to cut, and then when you hover your mouse over the CTI you'll see a little scissors icon there, and when you click on it, it slices your clip in half. And I do want to show you one thing, I'm going to Control+Z, or Command+Z to undo that cut. Important to note, I'm just going to put a clip on the track above. Notice that when I'm clicking off those, when no clips on the timeline are selected, if I click on the scissors icon, you notice it slices through every clip on every track. Control+Z or Command+Z to undo those. But notice, if I have a clip selected say this one, when I slice only the selected clip is sliced. Just an important thing to note there. Let's Control+Z or Command+Z to undo that. Put these side by side again. Trimming means removing from the beginning or the end of a clip. So in other words, if this clip I don't want it to start at it's start point, I want it to start a few seconds in, I simply hover my mouse over the beginning. You'll see the trim indicator there in the lower left-hand corner. And when I drag it in, it trims. And you notice that you get a preview of where the new trim point is. Likewise the end, I can drag in. You'll notice that because there's a clip following I will see a preview in that monitor as I trim of both the outgoing clip and where the next clip starts. One other thing you may notice, as I trim here, whether I'm expanding or removing video, you notice that the clips that are on the right slide in to fill in the gap. That's called rippling. Rippling is important to understand and most of the time it works to your advantage. So for instance, if I've got clips on my timeline and I've got a whole movie built, and I decide I want to add a clip in between these two clips that are already there, I go to Project Assets, drag it right in between the two, and you notice that it kind of shoves everything off to the right. No matter how much movie I had there, it would have rippled off to the right to allow me to insert this clip. Likewise, if I select this clip and remove it, everything to the right on the timeline slides in to fill the gap. Now that's rippling, and like I say, most of the time it works to your advantage. There is sometimes though, when it can be just a little frustrating and I'll show you how to work with that. Suppose for instance, you've got a music clip on your music track. There it is. And now I add a clip to insert here between clip number one and clip number two. Watch what happens. It inserts and everything slides off to the right, but look what happened to my music track. It broke and slid off to the right too. You may not want that. So you're building a slideshow, or some other kind of music sequence and you're trying to insert clips and every time you do it's breaking the music track. I'll show you how to get around that. Let's select that clip, we're just going to undo it. Control+Z, Command+Z, to remove it. If I hold down the Control key or the Command key on a Mac, and insert a clip, notice what happens. Nothing moves. Ripple is shut down completely and we actually overwrote the clip that was on the timeline. It didn't move, we actually wrote right over it. And now we'll see this clip rather than the clip that was there. Let's Control+Z or Command+Z to undo that. More often, you're going to want to do this. Hold down the Alt, or the Option key, when I drag to insert here, notice that rippling is limited to only the track where I'm adding the clip. That's pretty cool, huh? So we still got the ripple, but it didn't break up the music track and split it. So, that Alt or Option key will override rippling, or control rippling so that it only effects the track that you're adding the clip too. Premiere Elements makes splitting and trimming your scenes very simple and intuitive. And the program's function, as I said, is designed to make the process as simple and as intuitive as possible. And once you master these three features alone, we'll that's going to be 90% of your editing. It takes you a long way toward mastering the editing process with this program.

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