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Arrange clips

Every edit on the reel timeline is a drag. What it does depends on where you grab a clip and which key you hold, and the pointer changes shape to tell you before you press.

Edit Grab Does
Reorder The strip along a clip's top Moves the clip to another place in the running order.
Trim Just inside a clip's edge Changes that clip's length.
Ripple A clip's edge, with Ctrl held Changes its length and moves everything after it.
Roll The exact cut between two clips The two clips trade screen time.
Slide A clip's face, with Alt held Moves the clip into the empty space beside it.
Slip A shortened clip's face, with Ctrl+Alt held Changes which part of the shot plays, without moving the clip.
Replace Another clip, with Ctrl held while reordering The dragged clip takes that clip's place and screen time.

A plain drag across clips' faces selects them. See Select several.

Reorder

Drag a clip by the strip along its top. A white line shows where it will land; let go and the clip moves there. Drop it at or past the end of the reel to put it last. Gaps reorder the same way.

A clip with a gap beside it slides instead, until you drag it past that gap and the clip beyond. See Slide.

Reorder: the first clip carried to the end, the insertion indicator flipping to either side of the last clip before the drop

Trim

Drag just inside a clip's edge to change its length.

  • Shortening opens a gap, so nothing after the clip moves. See Gaps.
  • Lengthening takes the time from whatever is next on that side: a gap shrinks, and a clip gets shorter, down to a tenth of a second. A neighbor used up completely disappears.
  • A clip grows only as far as its shot has frames. A dotted outline shows how far that is while you drag.
  • The viewer follows the edge, showing the frame it has reached.
  • At the ends of the reel, the last clip's right edge can grow out past the end, and a clip's left edge stops at the start.

The edge you trimmed keeps its frame, so trimming the other edge afterward does not undo it. See Edges you drag keep their frame.

Trim: the second clip's head pulled in, then the first clip's tail; the gap that opens is selected and deleted

Ripple

Hold Ctrl while you drag an edge and the trim ripples: everything after the clip moves by the change, so no gap opens and no neighbor loses time. What counts is whether Ctrl is held when you let go, so you can decide partway through the drag.

Dragging the right edge of a gap that is the last thing on the reel always ripples.

A plain tail trim leaves a gap; the same trim with ++ctrl++ held closes it

Roll

Drag the exact cut between two clips and they trade screen time: one gets longer by what the other loses. The cut moves, and the reel's length and everything after it stay put.

The roll zone is narrow, a few pixels either side of the cut; a little further out, you trim the clip on that side instead. Neither clip can run past the end of its shot or get shorter than a tenth of a second, and two dotted outlines show how far each can go. The viewer does not follow a roll.

Roll: the seam dragged left, right and back; the two clips trade screen time and the reel's length never changes

Slide

Hold Alt and drag a clip's face to move the clip into the empty space beside it, without changing its length. The gap it moves toward shrinks, and the space it leaves becomes a gap. A plain drag on the top strip of a clip with a gap beside it slides too.

The clip stops at the far side of the gap; keep dragging past the next clip and the drag becomes a reorder. The last clip on the reel can slide right as far as you like, leaving a gap behind it. A clip with no gap on either side does not slide. Several clips selected side by side slide together.

Slide: a clip Alt-dragged into the gap on its left until its head snaps to the previous clip's tail

Slip

Hold Ctrl+Alt and drag the face of a shortened clip to change which part of its shot plays. The clip stays where it is and keeps its length. A dotted outline the length of the whole shot shows how much there is to slip into on each side. A clip playing its whole shot has nothing to slip, so the drag does what it would without the keys.

Replace

Hold Ctrl while you reorder a clip, and carry it over another clip: the target washes green, and when you let go the dragged clip takes the target's place and screen time. The target is removed, and the dragged clip's old place closes up. Cards replace and can be replaced the same way; gaps cannot.

To replace a clip with a shot from the picker, hold Ctrl as you drop it. See Where a dragged shot lands.

Replace With… on a clip's right-click menu, or the replace button in Selected Clip Settings, "Replace: swap this clip for a different shot, keeping its place in the reel and its screen time", opens the shot picker instead. Keep the previous clip's length is on by default: the new shot holds for as long as the old clip did, and a shorter shot leaves a gap to make up the difference, so nothing after it moves. Turn it off to play the new shot in full and move everything after it.

A longer shot that keeps the old clip's length starts at its first interest point while Start replacements at the marked interesting point is on. See Where interest points come in.

Replace: a three-second shot from the picker over a one-second clip and a seven-second one, with and without ++ctrl++

Select several

  • Click a clip, card or gap to select it and move the playhead to it.
  • Ctrl-click adds or removes one item. Shift-click selects everything from the last item you clicked to this one.
  • Ctrl+A selects every item on the reel, and Ctrl+Shift+I inverts the selection: what was selected is not, and the rest is.
  • Drag across clips' faces to draw a box. Every clip and gap it crosses is selected.
  • Up and Down step the selection while a clip is selected. With nothing selected, Down jumps the playhead to the next item's start and Up to the previous one: the start of the item it is in, then the one before.

With several items selected, the settings panel reads 3 items selected, with the count, and only removal works.

Box-selecting clips, Ctrl-clicking one back out, ++delete++ removing the rest as one step, and Undo bringing them back

Remove a clip

Del or Backspace removes the selection. A removed clip leaves a gap of its length, so nothing after it moves; a removed gap closes up.

Right-click a clip for Remove from Reel, or right-click inside a selection for Remove 3 Items, with its count. The same menu holds Play in Full, which puts the clip back to its shot's whole length, Replace With…, Edit Metadata… and Reveal in File Browser.

Gaps

A gap is a stretch of the reel where nothing plays: black picture, with no sound of its own, though the music keeps playing through it. Gaps come from shortening a clip, removing one, or sliding one away.

  • Hover a gap to see its length, and click it to select it.
  • Right-click it for Fill with a Shot…, Remove Gap, and a Fill With submenu with Image Card…, Color Card… and Title Card…. See Cards.
  • Two gaps side by side merge into one.
  • Export Video renders a gap as black for its length, with the music playing on under it, exactly as the viewer shows it. Export Timeline writes it as a gap, since a gap is ordinary in an editor.

Snapping

N turns snapping on or off, and it starts on. ShotWork remembers the setting for every reel. Hold Shift during a drag to reverse it for that drag only.

While snapping is on, trims, rolls, slides and a song bar's ends pull to the nearest of these once they come close. A vertical line with a diamond above the clips shows what caught the edge:

Target Line
Another clip's or gap's edge White
A beat in the music; see Beats and downbeats Green
An interest point on another clip; see Interest points Amber
The budget line, for a clip's right edge only; see Set a length budget Green

A slide snaps its head first; its tail gets a turn only when nothing is in range of the head, so when both ends are near something, the cut lands where you were looking.

Interest points show on each clip as small amber diamonds. Show interest points on clips, under Reel Settings, hides them and stops snapping to them. They are read-only on the reel timeline: right-click the clip and choose Edit Metadata… to move or add them in the shot selects the shot came from.

While snapping is live, the beats nearest a dragged edge glow toward it.

Snapping: the last clip's tail trimmed onto a downbeat, then the clip slid along the beat grid with both edges catching marks as it travels

Wheel and zoom

Gesture Does
Scroll Steps one frame per notch.
Hold Ctrl and scroll Pans the view by a tenth of what is visible.
Hold Alt and scroll Zooms around the pointer.
Middle-drag Pans the view.
Hold Alt and middle-drag Zooms around where you pressed: right to zoom in, left to zoom out.

Zooming and panning set the playback range, so the range slider under the reel timeline follows and playback loops over what you zoomed to. Neither is an undo step. See Loop a section.

Double-click the range slider to show the whole reel, and double-click it again to go back to where you were.

Reading the ruler

The ruler above the clips shows where you are in the reel, in one of two ways. Right-click anywhere on the timeline for Show Times as Frames or Show Times as Timecode, which is the same choice as the Show times as buttons under Reel Settings: whichever you use, the other follows.

  • Timecode, the default: MM:SS:FF, or HH:MM:SS:FF with Display hours on. The last pair is the frame within that second, so at 24 fps it counts 00 to 23. A drop-frame rate (29.97 or 59.94) writes a semicolon before the frames, the way the standard does.
  • Frames: a plain running frame count, with nothing else.

The choice is shared with the shot selects tab's timeline as well, so a time means the same thing on every tab.

The marks come in three heights, so the scale reads without being looked up:

Mark Is
Tall, labeled with the time A whole second
Medium, labeled with a number A frame within that second, like 06 12 18
Short, unlabeled A single frame

Which of them appear depends on how far in you are zoomed. Frame numbers arrive once a few fit between two seconds, single frames get their own mark once each is a few pixels wide, and the numbers always land on whole frames.

Undo

Every edit on the reel timeline is one undo step, named in Edit › Undo, and undoing it restores the selection too. Zooming, panning and the display settings under Reel Settings are not undo steps.