Section 5.4. Shortening Clips by Dragging | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

5.4. Shortening Clips by Dragging

Almost nobody hits the camcorder's Record button at the precise instant when the action begins and stops recording the instant it stops. Life is just too unpredictable. That's why the first thing most people do when they get their clips into a movie is trim themto chop the boring parts off the beginning and ending of each clip before dragging them onto the timeline.

In the earliest versions of iMovie, you trimmed your clips by splitting them apart, by chopping off their ends or lopping chunks out of the middle. That was OK, but things got messy if you later changed your mind; if, for example, you cut 10 seconds off the end and later decided you wanted 5 of them back.

UP TO SPEED
Why Emptying the Trash Doesn't Restore Disk Space

OK, this is so weird. I had a ton of stuff in my iMovie Trash. But when I emptied it, the little "free disk space remaining" counter didn't change at all! I had 532 megs available before I emptied the Trash, and the same amount after!

No doubt about it: iMovie HD's revamped editing-and-Trash features are a blessing and a curse.

Here's the blessing: In iMovie HD, you can use the Revert Clip to Original command any time , even after emptying the Trash, even months or years later. You can also add back a missing chunk from the middle of a clip that you'd previously lobotomizedagain, even after emptying the Trash. You can chop, truncate, split, and shorten clips to your heart's content, and at any time, restore what you'd eliminated. (In previous iMovie versions, emptying the Trash meant that portions you cut from clips were gone forever.)

Here's the curse: These features work because iMovie quietly preserves the entire copy of every clip you import. If you split a clip in half, drag the second part to the Trash, and then empty the Trash, you don't get back one single byte of disk space. iMovie is hanging onto the entire original clip, just in case you change your mind someday.

The only time emptying the Trash actually frees up disk space, in fact, is if you've put an entire clip into it. If even one frame of it appears in the Timeline, iMovie still preserves the entire original clip on your hard drive.

So what if you've imported a 40-minute tape all in one clip and you intend to work with only the first 5 minutes' worth? Will that iMovie project occupy 40 minutes' worth of space on your hard drive forever?

Yes, unless you the somewhat drastic steps described on page 478. (In short, the process involves exporting the short clip to your hard drive as a full-quality DV movie, deleting all scraps of the original clip from iMovie, and emptying the Trash, which returns all that disk space to you. Finally, you drag the good part of the clip from the desktop back into the iMovie window. iMovie will be convinced that this 5-minute segment is the entire clip. )

Those time-honored techniquesand all of their related problemsstill work in iMovie HD. You can read about them later in this chapter.

Most of the time, though, you'll want to adopt one of iMovie's sweetest features instead: edge dragging . Instead of chopping off the ends of your clips, you can just hide the ends by dragging them inward, as shown in Figure 5-5. (This kind of nondestructive edge-dragging also works with audio clips. It's a common technique in GarageBand, too.)

Tip: Here's a great way to use this technique. First, play back the sequence. Using the arrow keys, position the Playhead so that it pinpoints the precise frame where you want the clip to end. In other words, you're using the Playhead to mark the target for the drag-cropping you're about to perform.Now grab the end of the clip and drag it up against the Playhead. Conveniently enough, the end you're dragging snaps against the ghosted Playhead line, as though it's a bookmark. As a result, you get individual-frame accuracy without having to remember precisely how far to drag. (This trick works only if "Snap to items in timeline" is turned on in iMovie

Preferences.)

Figure 5-5. Top and middle: In the Timeline Viewer, you can drag either the leading or trailing edge of a clip inward to shorten itnondestructively. All subsequent clips slide dutifully to the right or left to accommodate the adjusted clip's new length. Later, in a panic of indecision, you can drag the edge back outward to restore the hidden footage. Bottom: You can tell when a clip is stretched to its full length, because its end has a distinctive roundness.

The beauty of this approach, of course, is its flexibility. After you crop a clip this way, you can play it back to gauge its impact on the flow of scenes. If you feel that you trimmed a little too much, simply grab the end of the clip and drag it outward a little more. If you don't think you cropped enough, drag it inward.

And now, three delicious tips pertaining to edge-dragging:

In general, when you shorten a clip, all subsequent clips slide to the left to close up the gap. (That's what the pros call ripple editing.) Your overall movie gets shorter.

In some situations, though, you may want to shorten a clip without allowing any other clips to shift. Instead, you want to leave empty space behind as you shorten the clip, so that the overall movie stays exactly the same length.

To make it so, just press the key as you drag the clip's edge inward. Now you're creating a gap that, when played back, appears as black space. Later, you can either convert the gap to a clip unto itself (page 140) or fill it with pasted footage.
On the other hand, when you drag a clip's edge outward to expose previously hidden footage, iMovie generally shoves all subsequent clips to the right to make room. Your movie, as a result, gets longer.

Once again, though, the key can stop the rippling . If you press as you drag outward, you cover up some footage in the adjacent clip. Your movie remains exactly the same length.
Want better precision? Try this technique.

First, play back the sequence. Using the arrow keys, position the Playhead so that it pinpoints the precise frame where you want the clip to end. In other words, you're using the Playhead to mark the target for the drag-cropping you're about to perform.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Nondestructive Confusion

OK, hold on a sec. You're saying that if I drag the end of a clip, I can stretch it outward to restore some hidden footage. Sounds great, except for one thing: when I drag the beginning of a clip leftward, it shortens the clip before it! I don't want that!

Patience is the path to happiness, grasshoppa.

First of all, it is true that dragging a clip's left edge to the left looks like it's eating into the clip before it, which gets shorter and shorter as you drag. But it's just an optical fake-out; the instant you release the mouse, you'll see the squished clip snap back to its original length, as shown here.

OK, but I have another problem. Sometimes iMovie randomly refuses to let me do any edge-dragging at all. The little horizontal-arrow cursor just never appears.

It's true that iMovie sometimes doesn't let you do edge-dragging, but it's not at all random. You can't do edge-dragging when you've got audio levels turned on. Choose View Show Clip Volume Levels to turn off that feature; you can now drag clip edges as usual.

(Apple no doubt felt that you'd have too much trouble telling the program whether you were dragging an edge or an audio level , as described in Chapter 8.)

Now grab the end of the clip and drag it up against the Playhead. Conveniently enough, the end you're dragging snaps against the ghosted Playhead line, as though it's a bookmark. As a result, you get individual-frame accuracy without having to remember precisely how far to drag. (This trick works only if "Snap to items in timeline" is turned on in iMovie Preferences.)

There's only one limitation to this technique: It works only in the Timeline Viewer. You can't use it to pre-shorten clips while they're still in the Clips pane, or after you've dragged them into the Clips viewer. For those purposes, read on.