Making preliminary edits

What I'm going to do here is I'm going to take this clip and I'm going to add it to our Timeline by just dragging it and dropping it here, making it start at the first frame. And then I'm going to hit the Backslash key. That's the slash that's tilting backwards above the Return or Enter key on your keyboard. And that makes it though so we could see the entire clip at a glance. So basically takes the zoom of the Timeline, so you could see the entire clip. And as I play this, you'll see that we have a lot of extra material in the beginning of the clip. (Wind) Okay, so they're just kind of standing around for a while.

Let's move a little bit further in time and see how things are going. (Inaudible dialogue) Okay, still kind of standing around. A little bit farther. (Whirrrr.) (Male speaker 1: Ooo! Look at that!) And a helicopter goes through the shot. A little while longer, and we'll try that there. (Whirrrr.0 (Male speaker 2: That was bad.) Okay, talking about the helicopter. A little farther on, and somebody walks in front of the camera. So we are not quiet ready to start yet. So it's about 50 seconds into this clip before they even get something that we could even begin to edit.

So the first 50 seconds, this is really just a waste of time. My point here is that in the Timeline when you have tons of other clips and tons of other things going on usually, this is not the place to be making these huge gigantic cuts. So what I'm going to do is show you how to make an edit before you even bring a clip to the Timeline. I'm going to select the clip, click it to select it and then hit the Delete key to remove it. Now I'm going to go back up here to my Project panel and I'm going to double-click this clip. That will open it up in what's called the Source Monitor. That's by default the viewer on the left hand side. So the Program is the final project that we're making and the Source is basically a way that we can edit the material before it gets to the timeline.

So I'm going to scrub in time about 50 seconds or so, and it likes he's about to start going. Maybe like right here, (Male speaker: ?or if you're thinking about visiting California,) (Male speaker: then booking your trip through Explore California's the only way to go.) Okay! And it looks like he's about to start right there. Now, I usually like to leave a little bit of extra room so we can have some room to play with when we bring this down, so I might back this up just a little bit and then we're going to do something called creating an in point.

And that's going to be done by clicking this little button here. We could press the letter I on our keyboard also, and that basically says that this is the part where we want the clip to come in at. So we have the beginning of the clip over here on the left-hand side, but the part that we wanted to actually put into our program is the in point of the clip. Likewise, the point we want to stop taking stuff from the clip is the out point. So there is this zoom here, and I don't think I'm going to use anything after that zoom. So what I'm going to do is go up to right before it's zoomed and this is probably the last usable frame that we could possibly want to use.

And so I'm just going to press the letter O to set the out point. Now the clip is this long, not this long. And so what I can do now is put my Current Time Indicator into position at the beginning of my program where it's all zeros here, and then I'm going to click this button here, which is an overlay edit, which is going to just plop this right down on the Timeline there. And now we don't have those extra 50 seconds of helicopters and people walking in front of the camera, and we don't have the end with this close-up that we can't use.

So this is usable stuff. We still need to edit it, still need to tweak it, but now it's more of a process of refinement rather than getting rid of minutes of junk that we'll never use. By the way, another little trick here is that once we've made it is kind of cut, we've set an in point and an out point, I can drag this back to the Project panel, and that will create something called a sub-clip. So it will be almost like a piece of the whole that we can then use later on, as we see fit. So it doesn't really duplicate the clip on our hard drive. It just made another reference of the clip.

If I click the initial clip, you could see that it's-- well, the in points and out points are a little bit longer here. So I'm basically like trimming the end point to go back to beginning, and trimming the out point to go back to the end. And so now I have one clip of this that is 2 minutes and 8 seconds long, and we have another clip of this, which is still 55 seconds long. So we have the original and then trimmed. So if we wanted to go back to this original and get another piece of the video in the beginning or something like that, then we can continue to use this as like the master and this one as just that one clip.

This is especially good for like a documentary situation where you might have a really long interview with somebody, and you want a master shot like this where you can just continually take pieces, but then you want also like little blurbs that they'll be using, and you want to just keep taking sub-clips from that one long clip over and over again. So that's how you create preliminary edits with the Source Monitor.