Playing Your Clips

Now for a little fun. You easily can play any of your clips and view your graphics. Right-click a clip icon (if you right-click the clip filename, nothing will happen). This does two things: It places the clip's first frame in the little Project window monitor and opens a menu. As you can see in Figure 4.6, that menu offers a slew of choices. What you want to try out are Open in Clip Window and Open in Source Monitor.

Figure 4.6. The clip right-click menu gives you numerous options. For our purposes, try Open in Clip Window and Open in Source Monitor.

Open in Clip Window puts your clip in its own TV screen. The higher the resolution of your clip, the larger the screen. You can play it using the standard VCR buttons at the bottom of the screen.

Open in Source Monitor places the clip in the left monitor screen. Some editors call this the preview screen . As with the Clip window, you can use the VCR controls to view your clip.

In both the Clip window and the Source Monitor, you may notice some extra buttons in the lower-right corner that don't fit the standard VCR control style. I've highlighted them in Figure 4.7. These buttons are trimming and editing tools. I'll cover them in detail later.

Figure 4.7. The Clip window has standard VCR buttons as well as some editing tools.

You also can play a clip in the little monitor in the Project window. Clicking the little box in the lower-right corner replaces the menu thumbnail image (typically the first frame of video) with the selected frame (see Figure 4.8). One reason to select a new thumbnail is to make the video clip icon more representative of its contents--the first frame may be solid black, so the default thumbnail is black.

Figure 4.8. Use the little box in the Project Monitor to select a new thumbnail image.