The second Slice method is in the Timeline. This is where you really are slicing with a digital razor blade.
Open up your master clip from the Browser into the Viewer. It’ll probably have an In and Out point marked already. We need to clear those. If you control-click on the Scrubber Bar at the bottom of the Viewer you will evoke a contextual menu. Select Clear In and Out. This will, surprise, surprise, clear the In and Out points.
If you’ve opened a clip from the Browser and want to clear it’s In and Out points, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Opt-X. You can’t however clear the In and Out from a clip that’s been opened from the Timeline. By definition a clip that's in the Timeline must have marked In and Out points.
Open a new empty sequence and drag your master clip into into the Timeline. When you place a clip in the Timeline the playhead automatically jumps to the end of the clip, ready for you to place another clip in position. In this case we don’t want to do that, so simply click in the Timeline window to make it active and then hit the Home key on your keyboard to take you back to the beginning of the Timeline.
Press the spacebar to play the master clip in the Timeline. The video plays in the Canvas. Again use the spacebar to stop and the left and right arrow keys to find the start of the shot of the stone basin. When you’ve found it hit Control-V. This will cut the video and audio on the clip as if you were cutting it with a knife or a razor blade, which is what used to be used to cut film and audio tape, and even videotape when it was first edited. What you are doing is the digital metaphor for the same process. Now that you’ve made one cut, find the end of the shot and again use Control-V to cut the shot.
A moment ago we talked about where the cut takes place when you’re editing, that the In point cuts the space before the frame you’re looking at, and the Out point cuts after the frame you’re looking at. Well, the razor blade always cuts on the gap in front of the frame you’re seeing in the canvas. So in this Slice method to get the last frame of the shot you want you have to be looking at the first frame of the shot after it. If you Control-V on the last frame of the shot, the next shot will have one spurious frame at its head.
After you've made your two cuts with the digital razor blade in the Timeline window, grab the shot in the Timeline and drag it into a Bin in the Browser.
Using Control-V cut out a section that you don't want to keep. After you've made the slices click on the piece that you’ve cut from the master clip. This will highlight the edited section. Hit Delete. This will remove the clip from the timeline, but it will also leave a gap in the timeline. So let’s undo that using Cmd-Z. The undo will make the shot reappear in the hole in the timeline. Instead of simply deleting it, we will do what’s called a Ripple Delete. Select the clip, now hold down the Shift key, and hit delete. In addition to removing the clip, the Ripple Delete also pulls up all the other material shortening the timeline.
This is a good point to explain a bit about the relationship between the clips in the Browser and the clips in Timeline. Quite simply, there is no relationship, no direct, linked relationship anyway. They are two separate and distinct items. They may be copies of each other, but they are quite separate clips that share the same media. So in the first Slice method, when you mark up the master clip with In and Out points, you are marking one clip and making copies of it in the Bin. When you drag the master clip from the Browser and place it in a Timeline, what you are placing there is a copy of the master clip. So when you razor blade and ripple delete the clip in the Timeline, you are not in any way affecting the master clip that remains untouched in your Browser.
In addition to the keyboard shortcut, Control-V, for cutting the clip in the Timeline, you can also cut it up with the Razor Blade from the tools. The letter B for blade will call up the Razor Blade tool.
Now as you move along your clip in the Timeline, your cursor will show the Blade tool, rather than the Selector. The letter A is the shortcut that will return you to the Pointer tool. Of course with the cursor in Blade mode you cannot select a clip. Trying to select a clip will simple cut it, so to do your Ripple Deletes you would need to switch back and forth between the Blade and the Pointer. This can be done quickly using A and B. Or you can leave your cursor in Blade mode, and instead of clicking to select a clip, hold down the Control key when the cursor is above the clip you want to remove. Holding down the Control key will change the cursor from the Blade to the Contextual Menu. Mousing down will open the menu, and from the menu you can select the function Ripple Delete. Neat isn’t it?
Slicing, whether in the Viewer or the Timeline, has the advantage of being a quick and easy method to access all your material while still cutting it up into shots for editing. It has a couple of disadvantages; one is the problem in the Viewer as we discussed earlier of not being able to scrub the video easily. The other disadvantage is the problem of transitions, but I’ll talk about that a bit later after I show you the Dice or Subclip method.
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