Timeline Editing - Gesturally moving segments

Previously, you saw different editing workflows including slicing, lift, extraction and sub-clipping. Let’s have a closer look at moving segments around the sequence and the settings that affect your editing operations. To the top right of the sequence, you will see a bank of 5 buttons, of which 3 affect they way you move around the sequence. The first button is “SELECT”. This is mapped to A as a keyboard shortcut. If you just want to move clips around, than ensure you are in selection mode. This is much like the arrow tool in other editing software. You click the center of the segment, and drag it around the tracks as you need to. As you move the segment, you get a track indication as well as a time-code indication. The time-code value indicates which frame in the sequence will be the 1st frame of the segment when you release it. The track indication tells you which track the segment will be placed. If you lift the segment above all the tracks, the track indicator will tell you that it will add a new track if you release the segment at this point. You will also see how the indicators and cursor will inform you if try to edit video onto an audio track and visa versa. Finally, please pay attention to the colours of the track indicators as well as the editing symbols. Yellow indicates that ripple is on and this editorial mode will ripple the sequence. Red indicates that ripple is off and you are in overwrite mode. You can toggle ripple on and off while holding a segment, just by pressing OPTION after picking it up. The OPTION toggle is very handy to have when performing quick editing. But you can obviously set your main editorial mode by enabling the Ripple button on or off. This is mapped to SHIFT+R. As you saw earlier, with ripple off, all editorial functions are represented in Red. These visual cues inform you that you are overwriting your existing edit. This will not move any other segments in the sequence. When Ripple is on, all the visual cues turn to yellow. So you move one segment to another location in the sequence, the other segments will shift to make room for the selected segment. This matches editorial practices that you should be used to from other editing applications. The final function to be aware of is Snapping. Note that as the segment is moved up and down the sequence, it moves freely and unaware of other elements in the edit. So if you want the segment to be more aware of its surroundings, turn on the snap button. You can also use the N keyboard shortcut to toggle Snap on and off. The next time you move the segment, it will start snapping to aspects of the edit. This includes the positioner, transitions and markers. Please note that the head of the segment is snapping to the points in the edit. If you want the tail of the segment to snap in the sequence, hold CONTROL and the back of the segment will start snapping to points. And like you saw earlier with ripple, you can toggle snapping on and off dynamically. Let’s say snapping is off and during a move, you realise that you want to snap the segment to a cut or the positioner. Hold down SHIFT and this will toggle the snapping command. The indicators appear as you drag the segment around the edit. This functionality also works in reverse. If snap is turned on and you want to bypass the function, Hold down the SHIFT key. So up to date, you have seen a lot of editorial functions. But one aspect we need to focus on is something we deal with every day. Sync… In the next video, we will look at keeping sync in the sequence as well as working with sources that have synced video and audio.