Waste Less Time Trimming Clips in the Viewer

When you’re trimming a clip in the Viewer in preparation for dropping it down to the timeline (with F9 or F10, of course), you often want to see how the head (first frames of clip) or tail (last frames of clip) will play. You’ve set in and out-points, but want to see if you’ve found right frame. The easy way to do this is to use SHIFT Backslash (and yes, that is a backslash–the thing in a URL is called a slash):

This is the “Play In to Out” command and it’s a pretty straightforward, well known command. It starts play at the in-point (so you can see how the cut-in will look) and stops crisply on the out-point so you really know what you’re dealing with. I rarely use it.  A closely related, but lesser known and much lesser used shortcut is the powerful “Play to Out” command (SHIFT P):

I use this one all the time and find it much more efficient than SHIFT \ because I usually just want to see how my clip ends when I’m setting the out-point.  Additionally, in real life (and on deadline), some clips are just too long to sit through from in to out over and over again.  I’ll explain my rationale for this attitude after the break…

Here’s how it works for me in the real world:  I set an in-point with I and play a few seconds of the head. Then I usually hit SHIFT I to snap back to the in-point and then hit L to start play. I might then adjust the in-point and I might even do this a couple of times in some tricky cases where I’m cutting in the middle of a sentence. Then I scrub through the clip to the end and set an out-point.  At this point, I usually don’t care about the in-point any more–now I just want to see how clean my out-point is. So I either scrub back a few seconds using J or hit a couple of SHIFT Left Arrows (to jump back a couple of seconds) and then hit SHIFT P to get a nice clean stop at the out-point to evaluate the edit. I really don’t want to sit through the whole dang clip again.

All that being said, here’s my warning and my rationale for using all possible keyboard shortcuts in the Viewer and keeping your Viewer work quick and dirty: If you’re trimming clips in the viewer, you’re probably laying down a rough cut, right? Well, one of my cardinal rules of workflow efficiency is not to over-finesse the edit points in the Viewer during rough cut! Why? Because that kind of precision trimming is better done on the timeline using the more powerful tools available there. Besides, how can you really fine tune an in or out-point when you’re not seeing it in the context of the adjacent clip?

Some people overwork the in and out-points in the Viewer only to go back and fine tune them yet again later on the timeline. To me, that’s a classic example of an amateurish waste of time. We’ll talk about the fabulous timeline trimming shortcuts (and they are incredible) later, but if you’re an obsessive freak (and I am) who wants to finesse things to death, at least learn how to do it without wasting time–that gives you even more time to be obsessive where it really counts, right?  This is the very essence of efficiency (and why efficiency is not the enemy of quality) and why I love shortcuts like SHIFT P that help me get things done fast.