How to Trim Your Video

As your review your edit, your are often going to want to make fine adjustments to your edit decisions. Sometimes the beat of the music is a little off or you simply want to see a little more (or perhaps less) of a particular clip. Edius makes it easy to "trim" your video. The first step that I find makes trimming go a lot smoother is to enlarge the timeline so that you can zero in on the clip that you want to adjust. You can enlarge (or contract) the timeline, using the slider bar at the upper left hand corner of the time line window.

However, I find that I enlarge and contract the timeline so much during the course of an edit session, that I have assigned keyboard shortcuts for the task. I use the plus and minus keys to do the job. (For a lesson on how to change or assign keyboard short cuts check out the keyboard tutorial)

Once you have expanded the timeline, point your mouse between the two clips that you want to adjust. You should get a yellow and green highlight at the division of the clips.

Holding your left mouse button down, slide your mouse left and right to trim the video in either direction until it is exactly what you are looking for. You will notice that the play monitor and the record monitor will show you a live update for your adjustments.

For a much more elaborate approach to trimming your clips, you may want to check out the "Trim Window". With the timeline cursor over a clip that you would like to do some trimming function to, hit the F6 key, and now your play and record monitor becomes the "Trim Window".

You can now experiment different approaches to trimming and how it will effect surrounding clips by working with the various trim options circled in red. Once you have chosen a trim option to try, move your mouse cursor up into the trim window. Your mouse curser should turn into a orange "roller bar". Holding your left mouse button down, scrub back and forth (left and right) inside the trim window to make your adjustments. Try out all of the options to "Slip", "Slide" and "Roll" your adjustment. Notice how each approach effects the beginning and ending of a clip, or the surrounding clips.

The one that seems to work the best for me is the "slip" mode of trimming, but each to their own ....

Once you are happy, close the trim window by clicking on the large X button in the lower right corner, (circled in green in the illustration above) or hit F6 to toggle back to normal editing mode.

One thing to note, the trim window will work with the clip that your timeline curser is hovering over, NOT the clip that you may have selected by pointing to and clicking with your mouse. If the window is not working with the clip that you intended or expected it to, this is probably the reason why.

Happy Trimming!