Dragging a clip in
Dragging from a bin loads a clip into the Source monitor or places it in the timeline, while the keyboard keeps deciding what kind of edit it is.
A drag loads or places. The keyboard edits. That split is deliberate: a drag that could ripple the whole cut depending on a mode you cannot see is the thing this avoids, so dropping never splices.
Onto the Source monitor
Drop a clip on the Source monitor and it loads, ready to mark and edit with the keyboard. The monitor outlines itself while the clip is over it.
The Record monitor takes no drops. What plays there is the cut, and a shot dropped on it would have to guess a frame and a track — the timeline is where that question has an answer.
Into the timeline
Drop it on a track and it is placed there: an overwrite at the frame you let go of, nothing after it moves. While you drag, an outline shows exactly where it will land and how long it is — blue when it can go there, red when it cannot, so a sound-only clip over a picture track is answered before the drop rather than by a message afterwards.
Picture lands on the track you dropped on. Sound follows the patch, exactly as a keyboard edit does, so a drag and a keystroke route the same way and you never have to remember which you used.
Dropping straight onto an audio track puts the clip's first channels there — one for a mono track, two for a stereo one, six for 5.1 — and says so plainly if the clip does not have that many.
What it will not do
- It will not splice. That is a keystroke (
V), and keeping it one means a drag can never change the length of the cut by accident. - It will not drop a picture-less clip on a picture track, or a clip with too few channels on a wide audio track. Both are outlined in red first and refused with a reason.
Patching: drag a line from the source track to the track it should feed
Patching says one thing with two ends — this source track feeds that record track — and a menu can only ever hold one end at a time. So it is a drag, like the pick whip in After Effects.
Press on a source chip and drag. A line follows the pointer; drop it on the track you want it to feed. The row lights up as you pass over it, so what is on screen is the sentence you are saying.
- The chip on a track's left is the source that currently feeds it. Drag it to another track to move the patch there. Click it to turn that source off and on without unpatching it.
- Source tracks that are not patched to anything wait as small green chips in the Tracks heading at the top of the column. Drag one down onto a track.
- Drop a chip on nothing and that source is unpatched.
- Picture goes to picture and sound to sound. Drop one on the wrong kind and it says so rather than quietly doing nothing.
Right-click a chip for the plain list of source tracks, which is still there and still works.