The timeline of your project provides comprehensive support for selecting, adjusting, trimming, moving and copying clips.

Select clips in preparation for performing editing operations upon them. A selected clip receives an orange frame in the timeline and in the Storyboard, and is displayed as solid orange in the Navigator.

To select one clip, click it with the mouse. Any previous selections are removed. For a fast multiple selection, click in an open timeline area then drag out a selection frame that intersects the clips of interest. To select all clips with one command, press Ctrl+A.

To clear a selection click into any gap area of the timeline.

To create more complex multiple selections, left-click while pressing Shift, Ctrl or both together.

To select a series of clips: Click on the first and Shift-click on the last. The two clips together define a bounding rectangle, or selection frame, within which all clips are selected.

Toggle selection of one clip: Use Ctrl-click to reverse the selection state of a single clip without affecting any of the others.

Select rest of track: Press Ctrl+Shift-click to select all clips that start at or after the start position of the clicked clip. This function is particularly useful if you quickly want to get the rest of your timeline ‘out-of-the way’ for inserting new material, or to manually ripple left to close timeline gaps.

You can select and group multiple clips so that you can move the clips together. To group or ungroup clips:

As you move your mouse pointer slowly over the clips on your timeline, you will notice that it changes to an arrow symbol while crossing the sides of each clip, an indication that you can click and drag to adjust the clip boundary.

Adjusting changes the length of a single clip on the timeline in overwrite mode (since insert mode would cause synchronization issues). If you drag the start of a clip to the right, a gap will be opened on the left side. If there is a clip to the immediate left of the clip being adjusted, dragging to the left overwrites it.

The adjustment pointer also appears when the mouse hovers at the ends of a gap – an empty space on a timeline track with at least one clip to its right.

It turns out that adjusting gaps in overwrite mode, as we do for clips, is not especially helpful. However, gaps do come in handy when you’re editing in smart mode if you want to ripple an individual track left or right, ignoring any resulting synchronization issues. Adjusting gaps therefore occurs in insert mode.

Even if no gap is available, incidentally, you can get the same result by holding Alt while adjusting the sides of a clip.

The first two options affect the treatment of clips that are not in conformance with the current timeline format when brought into the project. See “The Timeline toolbar” on page 48. Right-click a clip in the timeline, click Scaling in the context menu, and choose one of the following: