Apple Final Cut Express 4 - Manual (Page 507)

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Learning About Trimming Clips
Adjusting a clip’s duration by moving its In or Out point, or
moving the edit point between two clips, is called trimming.
This chapter covers the following:
 What Is Trimming? (p. 507)
 Controls That Affect Trim Edits (p. 509)
 Selecting Edits and Clips to Trim (p. 510)
 Trimming Clip In and Out Points (p. 513)
What Is Trimming?
After you have roughly assembled your clips in chronological order in a sequence, you
begin to fine-tune the cut point (or edit point) between each clip. Any time you make a
clip in a sequence longer or shorter, you are trimming that clip. However, trimming
generally refers to precision adjustments (anywhere from one frame to several
seconds). If you are adjusting clip durations by much larger amounts, you are still
trimming, but you may not be in the fine-tuning phase of editing yet.
Getting an edit to work is an intuitive process, so you need to watch the results of your
trimming adjustments repeatedly as you trim. Many factors go into the decision of
when exactly you cut from one shot to the next. When you fine-tune your sequence,
you are no longer focused on the larger structure of the movie, but how each shot
flows to the next. You focus on individual edit points between clips instead of large
groups of clips. In most cases, you aim to achieve a certain visual and
psychological continuity.