Cutting
The gestures a day is made of — add an edit, top and tail a take, and the three-point edits underneath them.
B/side cuts the way Media Composer does: you mark a piece of the source, you mark where it goes, and the keyboard decides what kind of edit it is. A drag never splices.
Three-point editing
Mark IN and OUT on the source (I and O), park the playhead where it goes, and press:
| B | Overwrite — the marked piece lands at the playhead and covers what was there |
| V | Insert — it goes in and everything after it moves along (Media Composer calls it Splice-in) |
| Z | Lift — take the marked range out and leave the gap |
| X | Extract — take it out and close the gap |
Three points is all it needs. Mark two on the source and one on the record and the fourth is worked out; mark a range on the record instead and the source's IN is where it starts from.
Seeing the source in the timeline
The SOURCE | RECORD switch at the left of the timeline header picks what the timeline shows. On RECORD it is the cut. On SOURCE it is the clip in the Source monitor, laid out track by track on a green ground so you cannot mistake it for the cut: click to park the source playhead, scrub it, and mark IN and OUT there with the full length of the take in front of you. Edits still go into the cut, so splice and overwrite work the same with either side showing. You cannot drag a clip into the timeline while it shows the source; switch back to RECORD first. The same switch is on a key in the Command Palette (Show Source in Timeline). The switch moves the monitors with it: SOURCE lights the Source monitor green and the Record monitor stops being red, so the colour on screen is always the side you are on.
A shot that will not play
A shot whose media is gone is red and hatched on the timeline. While the cut plays, a shot that cannot play yet — its media still being copied or uploaded — flashes red too, because it plays black and silent just the same. The Media tab says where each one is.
Replace — ⌘D
Swaps the shot under the playhead for the one in the source, keeping the cut's timing exactly. Same place, same length, nothing after it moves, sync untouched. It is the commonest fix on an unscripted show: the line is cut, the timing works, and the shot is wrong — a better angle, a cleaner take, the graphic with the typo fixed.
The alignment is the point: the frame showing in the source lands on the frame the playhead is on. So park on the beat — the punch, the laugh, the door closing — park the source on the same beat from the other camera, and press it. The two line up whatever their heads and tails turn out to be.
If the source hasn't got the frames for it, nothing happens except a sentence telling you which way to move:
> "MVI_4826" has only 10 frames before this one — park the source later in the shot, or the playhead > earlier in the cut
Split at Playhead — ⌘E
Media Composer calls it Add Edit.
Cuts the shot under the playhead in two. Nothing about the picture or the sound changes: both halves keep the clip, the effects, the gain and the speed they had, and the second half starts on exactly the frame the monitor was showing.
It is how you get a piece of a shot to work on — grade the second half of a take, mute a cough, slow one beat down, replace a line — and how you make a handle for a dissolve out of the middle of a take.
It refuses in one place: under a transition. A dissolve is defined by the one edit it sits on, and a second edit beneath it would leave the mix joining shots it was not made from.
Trim Start and Trim End to Playhead — ⌘G and ⌘B
The two gestures a dialogue cut is actually made of. Media Composer editors know them as Top and Tail.
- Trim Start to Playhead takes the head off the shot, from its start to the playhead.
- Trim End to Playhead takes the tail off, from the playhead to its end.
Both close the gap, and sync-locked tracks come with them. So the working rhythm is: lay the take in, play it, stop on the first word, Trim Start; play on, stop after the last word, Trim End. Two keys per take.
Neither has a default key in Media Composer — every editor who uses them picks their own — so these are a starting point and not a claim about what your hands know. Both are remappable like everything else (Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts), and Premiere's Q and W are two clicks away if that is where your fingers go.
Jump to the next event — ↑ and ↓
One key that walks the cut, and you decide what it stops on. Every editor wants something different from it, and the same editor wants something different after lunch: laying picture it is edits, mixing it is automation and nothing else, reviewing it is notes and the gaps where footage is missing.
Sequence ▸ What the Jump Stops On… Tick any of:
| Edits | where one shot becomes another — what A and S already do |
| Gaps | where a track has nothing on it, and where it starts again |
| Notes | every note on the tracks in scope |
| Transitions | the middle of a dissolve, and either end of it, which is where a trim stands |
| Automation | level and pan points, including a shot's own curve |
| Effects | where a shot carrying a grade, a blur, a key or a reframe starts |
| Marks | your own IN and OUT |
The dialog counts what each one would find in the cut you have open, because "Automation" is a word and "47 in this cut" is what tells you whether you have picked the right thing.
The tracks change what it means
This is the other half of it, and it is Avid's rule: the jump looks at the tracks that are on. Turn V1 on by itself and ↓ walks the picture; turn the sound on too and it walks both. Two more choices if you want them: every track regardless of what is enabled, for the pass where you want every note in the episode; and the tracks I have selected, which narrows to the tracks carrying a selected shot.
Each landing says what it found — edit on V1, note: fix the eyeline, level point on A3 — and when several things sit on the same frame it says so, because one frame is one stop however many reasons there are to stop there.
↑ and ↓ are the defaults and both are remappable like everything else (Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts). A and S still do exactly what Avid does, untouched.
Gaps, and where the cut starts
A gap is a stretch of track with nothing on it: black on a picture track, silence on a sound track. (Media Composer calls it filler.)
- Insert Gap (Sequence menu): mark an IN and an OUT in the Record monitor and turn on the tracks it goes on. That much gap goes in at the IN, and everything after it moves later by the same length. Sync-locked tracks make room too, so sound stays with its picture, and your notes move with the shots they are about.
- Overwrite with Gap (Sequence menu): the same marks, but the range is emptied and nothing moves, like Lift.
- Sequence ▸ Sequence Settings… ▸ Filler at the start puts a gap before the first frame on every track and moves the whole cut later. Type the length: 10:00 is ten seconds, 1:00:00 a minute. This is where a slate and a countdown go.
- Sequence ▸ Sequence Settings… sets the timecode of the sequence's first frame, for example 00:59:50:00 so the programme itself starts at 01:00:00:00 after ten seconds of slate. Only the timecode changes; every edit stays where it is.
The record playhead can go past the end of the cut, over the filler after it, so you can park there and mark an IN for something that should land after a gap. Playing from out there does nothing, because there is nothing to play.
Each of these is one step in Undo.
What stops you
Every refusal names the thing it is about, because an edit that silently does nothing is worse than one that fails:
> The position indicator is already at the head of this shot
> There is a transition across that frame on V1; move off it or take the transition off first
> Not enough media in "MVI_4826" — the dissolve needs frames either side of the cut