What Is Trimming?
After you have roughly assembled your clips in chronological order in a sequence, you
begin to fine-tune the cut point (or edit point) between each clip. Any time you make a
clip in a sequence longer or shorter, you are trimming that clip. However, trimming
generally refers to precision adjustments (anywhere from one frame to several
seconds). If you are adjusting clip durations by much larger amounts, you are still
trimming, but you may not be in the fine-tuning phase of editing yet.
Getting an edit to work is an intuitive process, so you need to watch the results of your
trimming adjustments repeatedly as you trim. Many factors go into the decision of
when exactly you cut from one shot to the next. When you fine-tune your sequence,
you are no longer focused on the larger structure of the movie, but how each shot
flows to the next. You focus on individual edit points between clips instead of large
groups of clips. In most cases, you aim to achieve a certain visual and
psychological continuity.
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Fine-Tuning Your Edit
You can trim edits anywhere you can adjust a sequence clip’s In and Out points—
the Timeline, the Viewer, and the Trim Edit Window, which is designed specifically for
fine-tuning edits.
 Viewer: You can open a sequence clip in the Viewer and adjust its In or Out point.
This is useful if you want to find a particular frame for your In or Out point by looking
at the clip’s entire media file. However, if you are trying to adjust edit points on two
clips simultaneously (a “two-sided” edit), the Timeline or Trim Edit window is better.
 Timeline: In the Timeline, you can roll an edit point between two clips. A roll edit
adjusts the Out point and In point of two adjacent clips simultaneously. The result is
that the edit point between the two clips moves, but no clips change position in the
Timeline. For more information, see “
Using the Roll Tool to Change Where a Cut
Occurs
” on page 334.
You can also trim edit points in multiple tracks simultaneously. The Timeline makes it
easy to drag clip In or Out points to make a clip longer or shorter, and to quickly trim
multiple clips at once.
You can adjust the level of precision of your editing by setting the zoom level in the
Timeline. By zooming in, you can make changes all the way down to a clip’s
individual frames. If you want to trim clips by a precise number of frames or seconds,
you can enter exact timecode values for trimming. This is sometimes referred to as
numeric editing, or trimming using timecode.
 Trim Edit window: The Trim Edit window allows you to focus on a specific edit point
in the Timeline, visually trim one or more edits with precision, and preview the edit
at the same time. It combines the convenience of trimming in the Timeline with
additional options available in the Viewer. The changes you make using the Trim Edit
window only affect the clips in the Timeline.
Clips from either side of an edit point are shown, each in its own Viewer-like display.
The outgoing clip is the clip before the edit point, and the incoming clip is the clip
after the edit point.
Almost any trimming you can do in the Timeline can be done in the Trim Edit
window, including trimming multiple clip items at once. For more information, see
Chapter 20, “
Trimming Clips Using the Trim Edit Window
,” on page 357.
Chapter 19
Learning About Trimming Clips
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