Trimming Digital Video Clips

Professional Hollywood moviemakers typically shoot hundreds of hours of footage just to get enough acceptable material for a 2-hour feature film. Because the pros shoot a lot of "waste" footage, don't feel so bad if every single frame of video that you shoot isn't totally perfect either. As you preview your clips, you're sure to find bits that you want to cut from the final movie.

Consider a scene where the subject scratches his lip for a few moments at the beginning of the clip. This lip scratch would be fine, except that it kind of looks like he's picking his nose. You can't have that in the final movie. Besides, the clip may be about 11 seconds long, and you really need only about 5 seconds or so.

The solution is to trim the clip to just the portion that you want. The easiest way to trim a clip is to split it into smaller parts before you place it in your movie project.

Follow these steps to cut up your clip:

1. Open the clip that you want to trim by clicking it in the browser, and move the play head to the exact spot where you want to split the clip.

Use the playback controls in the preview window to move the play head.

2. In Pinnacle Studio, right-click the clip in the browser and choose Split Scene from the menu that appears. In Apple iMovie, choose Edit --> Split Video Clip at Playhead.

You now have two clips, where before you had only one.

3. To split the second clip again, choose the second clip by clicking it in the browser and move the play head about 5 seconds forward in the clip.

4. Repeat Step 2 to split the clip as many times as you want.

You now have three clips that you created from the one original clip (as you can see in Figure 1 below). Splitting clips like the preceding steps describe isn't the only way to trim unwanted portions of video. You can also trim clips after you place them on the timeline of your movie project. But you often can split the clips before you add them to a project much more easily because the unwanted parts split into separate clips that you can use (or not use) as you want.

Don't worry! Trimming a clip doesn't delete the unused portions from your hard drive. When you trim a clip, you're actually setting what the video pros call in points and out points. The software uses virtual markers to remember which portions of the video that you choose to use during a particular edit. If you want to use the remaining video later, you can still find it on your hard drive, ready for use.

You can also usually unsplit clips that you have split. In Pinnacle Studio, hold down Ctrl and click each of the clips that you split earlier. When you have each clip selected, right-click the clips and choose Combine Scenes from the menu that appears.

Unfortunately, Apple iMovie doesn't have a simple tool for recombining clips that you've split. If you just split a clip, you can undo that action by choosing Edit --> Undo or by pressing Command+Z (this only undoes the split).