Overwriting & Inserting Clips in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip, I am going to explain overwriting versus inserting clips. So let's take a look now at the edit overlay. You remember in a previous video when I was showing you how to bring video into your time line from the viewer, I dragged it to the right here. Now this is the edit overlay. You notice that when your cursor is over it with no video there is nothing. You have to drag a video to it before these options appear. You have as follows. You have inserts, overwrite, replace, fit to fill and super impose. I am only going to talk about insert and overwrite for right now. I'll cover the other 3 later on. Now let's go to the time line and place our cursor somewhere, anywhere and click for the play head. So the play head is now in the middle of a clip. Drag the clip from the viewer over into the canvas and click insert. What happens is it places that video, that footage, right where our play head was and then it shifted to the time of the entire sequence over. It shifted everything to the right of that marker over. If I undo it, you can see how it comes back. Now let's do the same thing except for instead of insert, I do overwrite. Now what that did is it just went right on top of everything. It didn't shift the time at all. It just put itself on top of all the footage. Now which one do you want to use. It depends. You know if you want to add a clip in between these two clips, then you will most likely do insert. If you are just looking to cover up the video, then you can do overlay or if there is no video to cover up, you can still do overlay. Now there is another way to achieve this same affect. By clicking and dragging from the viewer down into the time line, you will notice that your cursor is a down arrow when you are at one point and it turns to an arrow at the side when you are at another point; down arrow, side arrow. What that is when it is a down arrow, that is overlay. So you let go and it is just going to drop in to your time line on top of the footage. The arrow pointing to the side is insert so if you let go it will shift everything over just like insert."