Timeline editing basics - Screenflow Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter we're gonna shift our focus to refining your story by learning how to edit your movie with the ScreenFlow editor. Now this is where you're gonna spend most of your time. Now if you're following along I'm in the timeline project. Now ScreenFlow arranges your media clips into a stack of tracks. Think of these tracks as layers of glass that you're looking down through from top to bottom. Content that appears on a higher track will appear in front of any content that appears on a lower track. A common organizational practice in most video editing programs is to arrange your tracks so that any visible media appears on the upper tracks while any audio only media appears on the lower tracks. You can change the position of a track by using the track grabber handles here at the head of the track. Just click and drag to reposition the track. If you're working with a lot of tracks, it may be helpful to switch to a short track mode by clicking to down arrow at the head of the track. Or you can use the up arrow to expand the track and get a better look at the audio wave form. Now if you wanna temporarily disable the visual contents of a track you can do so by clicking the I icon in the head of the track or to temporarily disable all of the audio for a particular track you could do so by clicking the speaker icon. Clicking either of those icons will return the track to its normal visibility. Now the key focus point while editing is the scrubber or play-head, clicking on the small bar above the tracks will allow you to jump your play-head to that location. You can use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge the play-head one frame at a time or you can hold down the shift key as you press the arrow keys in order to move your play-head one second at a time. If you hold down the command key with the left arrow key it'll jump your play-head back to the beginning of your project. And command right arrow will jump your play-head down to the end of the project. For this next section I'll select all the tracks then if you prefer navigating with your mouse all of the commands that we're gonna go over next can be found under the edit menu in this section. And we've already seen that you can press the T key in order to split all the currently selected clips at the play-heads location and that will automatically select all of the clips on the left or the upstream side of the play-head. But if we undo that and instead you press shift T, that'll split all the currently selected clips at the play-head and select all of the clips on the right side of the split. Now if you have some clips selected and you move your play-head down to a location where you wanna make an edit and then you press the W key. This will trim the front of the clip up to the scrubbers location. I'll undo that and instead, if you press the E key, this will trim from the scrubber to the end of the clip, I'll undo that as well. These next commands can be found up here under the mark menu and they're for marking in and out point. You wanna deselect your clips to perform these actions by clicking on an empty region of a track. You can quickly set in and out points for an edit by moving your play-head to a location where you wanna make an edit and then pressing the I key to set an in point. Then move your play-head down to another location and press the O key to set and out point. Now this acts as a selection that you can perform an action on. If you press the delete key then all of the clips under the selection will go away and a gap is left in your timeline. You can then fill that gap with other content or manually close the gap by dragging the clips together. I'll undo those actions and then set a new in and out point. You can set these points in any direction. So I'll start with an out point now then jump my play-head down and then set my in point. Now at this selection, press command delete and the selection will be deleted and the gap will automatically be closed for you. Now this is called a ripple delete and its menu item can be found here under the edit menu. Now to intentionally create a gap in your movie, click to set your play-head location and then click and drag on the small flag icon at the bottom of your scrubber. This will open up a space for a new clip to be inserted. Now another way to set in and out points is to place your cursor at a location where you wanna make an edit then move your mouse down to another location and hold down the shift key as you click on the timeline. This'll automatically set the in and out points for you, and this can be done on either side of the current play-head location. Now if you have a selection that you wanna get rid of you can press option Z to clear the selection. Now with the clip selected you can nudge the clips position one frame at a time by pressing the square bracket keys on your keyboard. The right square bracket will move the clip one frame at a time to the right and the left square bracket will move the clip one frame at a time to the left. Can you guess what shift left and shift right bracket is going to do. If you guessed, moving the currently selected clip one second in that direction, you're right. Finally, if you drag clips next to each other, they'll automatically snap together. Now to get finer control of your clip placement, you can turn snapping off by clicking the magnet icon down here in the lower right. Now when you move your clips, they won't automatically snap right to the next clip. This will give you finer control over your clip placement. Now I prefer having snapping on, I find it really helpful. So I'll turn snapping back on and then I'll snap all of my clips back together.