From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Professional Trimming

Snapping and Linked Selection - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Professional Trimming

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Snapping and Linked Selection

- We've been talking about trimming on the timeline, and when you're doing those sorts of timeline operations, there's a couple of really important toggle switches on the timeline. Snapping and Linked Selection. Now, you may be familiar with these already but they're particularly important when trimming on the timeline, both with the selection tool and the other tools, so I wanted to take a detailed look. Here we are down on the timeline and the two toggles are right here, Snap and Linked Selection. By toggle, I mean they don't actually do anything when you click these buttons. They're more the condition that the timeline operates in. Snapping maybe the most familiar and you can see it's blue so it's active. The key to snapping, and you really have to feel this, you can see it but it's better to feel it, is, and I'm going to mute for a second, we don't need the audio, but when you move things around the timeline, you see they have a tendency to stick. You see that triangle come up at the playhead? or when you move back there you see the white triangle pop up? Tactilely, this feels like legos snapping together, it just feels like it just wants to go there or it wants to go (makes a poop sound) there. It just, sort of, snaps and clicks in place. Same thing when I'm doing a trim. If I drag this edit point, it wants to stick, there you see the triangle, stick on the playhead. That can be useful when you're using your playhead for, sort of, a guide or when you're shuffling around these clips and you want them to just, kind of, stick like a magnet. But other times it can be a little annoying so if I'm trying to make a trim where I'm just going to overlap this a little bit, and in fact you can see up in my program viewer that it gives me a little visual preview, but if you're trying this, the trouble with snapping is when I just start to overlap, it won't really do it for me, it either wants to be right there on the edit point or substantially into the edit point, it won't let me shave off one or two frames at a time. I just go ahead and click the magnet or click "s" which does the same thing, toggle snapping. Now, I've got free range of motion. Nothing tends to stick anywhere and if I want to just nudge over by a few frames, you see I have no problem there and if I'm using the visual guide up top, I can overlap as much or as little as I want. Snapping often wants to be turned off when you're doing detailed trims but often wants to be turned on when you're shuffling things around. Of course, there's always exceptions, if you want to make a trim where you place your playhead exactly where you want the new edit to be and then you turn on snapping and just drag to the playhead, that works fairly well. The other toggle I want to talk about is Linked Selection. This has to do solely with audio and video on the timeline. Whether you're doing a trim or, in fact, just doing a move, you'll notice with Linked Selection on that audio and video when linked are always selected together. In the case of a trim, if I want to trim back this audio, the video and audio move together, I can't really make a trim of only the audio without also affecting the video track. Not true if I turn off Linked Selection. Now, I have free play on my audio, completely separate from my video. These are two toggle switches, on or off. Snapping which controls the tendency of the timeline to snap to the playhead or snap to other clips. If you've not felt that, I really encourage you to just try it, you really have to feel it, it feels like legos or magnets. Then Linked Selection which controls whether you're manipulating audio and video together or if you can manipulate them separately. These are, sort of, tried and true techniques for all of editing but they definitely, definitely come in handy when you're trimming.

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