Trimming & the Selection Tool in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to show you how to trim your clips using the selection tool. Now let's talk about trimming. If you remember in the last clip, there was a piece of footage that I said I thought was too long and I wanted to shorten it. Then I went to the edge and I just kind of dragged the edge of the clip and shortened it, I cut it off. Let me show you how to do that yourself and I'll explain it to you. With the pointed tool selected, come in to your sequence here in time line and you move it towards the edge of the clip. When it gets right at the edge you will notice that it switches from the pointed tool to this slide tool that has a couple of arrows pointing out at the sides there. That tells me that I can drag the edge of that clip to trim the clip making it longer or shorter. So if I click hold and drag it back, I am now making that clip shorter. All the footage that was now here is gone. It's a great tool to utilize when let's say you know where you want to trim it to but you don't want to mess around with trying to get it exactly. You can just take your play head, get to that point, make sure snapping is on, click the edge and just drag it and snap it and now it plays to where you want it to. Obviously you have black, go to click that and delete it and now they are bumped up together. Now it is important that when you are in between these 2 clips, when you are more to the left side, you drag to the left. When you are more to the right side, you drag the right one. So keep that in mind. Don't put it over here and thinking you can drag that right clip because it's not going to happen and vice versa as well. "