Editing on the timeline

Once you have clips on the timeline, most of your work is trimming and rearranging them: tightening a shot, changing where one clip cuts to the next, closing a gap. Sprocket gives you a row of editing tools for exactly this. This guide explains what each one does and when to reach for it.

If you haven’t yet, start with the Getting started guide — it covers opening a project, the basics of selecting and splitting clips, and the layout of the screen.

Before you start

You’ll need a project with a few clips on the timeline. The quickest way to follow along is File ▸ Open Sample Project, then split the clip into a few pieces with the Blade tool (see Split a clip with the Blade) so you have several clips to work with.

What’s in this guide

• The editing tools
• Select — move and trim
• Selecting several clips at once
• The four trim tools: Ripple, Roll, Slip, Slide
• Snapping
• Keeping audio and video together
• Moving clips between tracks
• Renaming and resizing tracks
• Nudging with the keyboard
• Deleting clips and closing gaps
• Cut, copy, and paste
• Splitting a clip at the playhead
• Duplicating a clip
• Turning a clip off without deleting it
• The right-click menu
• Fading a clip in or out
• Changing a clip’s speed
• Freezing a frame (frame hold)
• Duplicate or remove a single frame (stop motion)
• Getting around: Hand and Zoom

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The editing tools

The tools live in a row at the top-left of the window. One tool is active at a time, and the active tool decides what happens when you click or drag a clip on the timeline. Click a tool to switch to it.

• Select, Blade, Ripple, Roll, Slip, and Slide change or rearrange your clips.
• Hand and Zoom just change your view of the timeline — they don’t touch your clips.
• Snapping and Linked (to the right of the tools) are toggles that stay on or off across every tool.

Select is the tool you’ll use most; switch to a specialized tool for a specific edit, then switch back.

The cursor tells you what will happen before you click. Each tool has its own pointer, and it changes shape as you hover over different parts of a clip — over a clip’s edge with Select it becomes a trim bracket, the Blade shows a razor, the trim tools show their own brackets and arrows. The Blade also draws a faint vertical line where your next click will cut, so you can line the cut up exactly before committing to it.

Select — move and trim

The Select tool (the default) does the two most common things:

• Move a clip — drag it left or right along its track, or up and down to another track.
• Trim a clip — hover over a clip’s left or right edge until the cursor becomes a trim handle, then drag the edge inward to shorten the clip or outward to reveal more of the original footage.

Trimming with Select leaves everything else where it is — shortening a clip opens a gap next to it. If you’d rather close the gap automatically, use the Ripple tool instead.

Selecting several clips at once

Most edits act on one clip, but you can select several and move, delete, or copy them together. With the Select tool:

• Ctrl-click a clip to add it to (or remove it from) the selection.
• Shift-click a clip to extend the selection.
• Drag across empty track space to draw a marquee — a selection box that grabs every clip it touches. Hold Ctrl or Shift while you drag to add to what’s already selected.
• Ctrl+A (Edit ▸ Select All) selects every clip on the timeline.

The selected clips are outlined in the accent colour. One of them — the last one you clicked — is the primary clip, drawn with a brighter outline than the rest:

The primary clip is the one the Inspector shows and the one that dialogs like Speed / Duration act on. Everything else — Delete, Ripple Delete, Cut, Copy, Duplicate, nudging, enabling and disabling — acts on the whole selection as a single undo step. Drag any selected clip and the entire set moves together, keeping their spacing.

The four trim tools: Ripple, Roll, Slip, Slide

These four tools all adjust clips that sit next to each other, each in a different way. They’re the tools that separate quick edits from tidy ones, so they’re worth learning. Here’s what each does (the app shows the same description as a tooltip when you hover over the tool):

Ripple

Trim a clip’s edge, and everything after it shifts to keep the timeline gap-free. Because the downstream clips move, the total length of your video changes.

Reach for Ripple when you want to tighten (or extend) a clip and automatically close (or open) the gap, without leaving a hole to clean up later.

Roll

Drag the cut point between two adjacent clips. The first clip’s end and the second clip’s start move together, so their combined length — and everything downstream — stays exactly where it is.

Reach for Roll when a cut happens a beat too early or too late and you want to change where one shot becomes the next, without shifting the rest of your edit.

Slip

Change which part of a clip’s footage plays, without moving the clip. The clip keeps its exact position and length on the timeline; only the in and out points into the original footage shift.

Reach for Slip when a clip sits in the right spot and is the right length, but you want to show a different moment from within it. (There’s nothing to animate here — the clip stays exactly where it is; only the footage playing inside it changes.)

Slide

Move a clip along the timeline while its neighbours absorb the change. The clip before it lengthens and the clip after it shortens (or the reverse), so the overall length and everything else stay put.

Reach for Slide when you want to reposition a clip that’s sandwiched between two others without leaving a gap.

At a glance

Tool	You grab…	What moves	What stays the same
Ripple	a clip’s edge	that clip’s length + everything downstream shifts	no gaps are left
Roll	the cut between two clips	where one clip ends and the next begins	total length, everything downstream
Slip	a clip’s body	which footage plays inside the clip	the clip’s position and length
Slide	a clip’s body	the clip’s position; neighbours resize to fit	total length, everything else

Tip: Ripple, Roll, and Slide all work on a clip that has a neighbour to act on. Slip needs a clip with unused footage before or after the part you’re using (a clip you’ve already trimmed).

Snapping

Snapping makes clip edges and the playhead click into place against nearby edits, markers, and the playhead while you drag — so cuts line up cleanly instead of leaving a one-frame sliver. It’s on by default; toggle it from the toolbar if you need to place something freely.

Keeping audio and video together

Linked keeps a video clip and its companion audio joined, so they move, trim, and cut together as one — for a clip that was imported with its own synced sound. It has no effect on unrelated clips: in the sample project, the music on A1 is a separate clip from the video on V1, so cutting one never affects the other.

Turn Linked off when you deliberately want to edit the picture and sound separately — for example, to let the audio from one shot carry over while the video cuts to the next (a “J” or “L” cut).

You can also create or break a link yourself. Select a video clip and an audio clip (see Selecting several clips at once) and choose Clip ▸ Link to join them into a linked pair; select a linked clip and choose Clip ▸ Unlink to separate it. Ctrl+L does whichever one fits your selection — it links an eligible video-plus-audio selection, or unlinks a clip that’s already part of a group.

Moving clips between tracks

With the Select tool, drag a clip up or down onto another track of the same kind (video onto a video track, audio onto an audio track). Higher video tracks appear in front, so moving a clip up to V2 places it over whatever is on V1 at the same time. Add more tracks with + Track at the top-right of the timeline.

Renaming and resizing tracks

Tracks start with plain names like V1 and A1, but you can rename them — “Music,” “Dialogue,” “Titles” — to keep a busy project straight. Double-click a track’s name in the header column on the left, type the new name, and press Enter (or click away) to save it. Escape cancels.

If long names don’t fit, drag the right edge of the header column to make it wider or narrower. The pointer becomes a resize arrow over the edge. (This is just for the current session — the column returns to its default width next time you open the project.)

Nudging with the keyboard

For small, precise moves, select a clip and nudge it one frame at a time:

• Alt+← — nudge the clip left
• Alt+→ — nudge the clip right

This is handy for lining up a cut to a beat in the music or a specific frame of action.

Deleting clips and closing gaps

There are two ways to remove a clip, and the difference is what happens to the space it leaves behind.

Say you have three clips in a row:

Delete (Delete) removes the selected clip and leaves a gap where it was. The clips after it stay put:

Ripple Delete (Shift+Delete) removes the clip and slides everything after it back to close the gap, so your video gets shorter with no empty space:

Both are also in the Edit menu.

Cut, copy, and paste

Clips go on the clipboard like text does, so you can lift a clip from one spot and drop it in another:

• Cut (Ctrl+X) removes the selected clip(s) and puts them on the clipboard.
• Copy (Ctrl+C) copies without removing.
• Paste (Ctrl+V) drops them back onto the timeline.

The key thing to know is where a paste lands: at the playhead. Position the playhead where you want the clip to start, then paste. If you copied several clips at once, the earliest one lands at the playhead and the rest keep their spacing relative to it — so you can copy a whole arranged section and drop it elsewhere intact, as one undo step. Pasted clips are independent copies, so editing a copy never changes the original.

Splitting a clip at the playhead

Besides the Blade tool, you can split the selected clip right where the playhead sits: choose Clip ▸ Split at Playhead (Ctrl+K). This is handy when the playhead is already parked on the exact frame — you don’t have to aim the Blade. If the clip has linked audio, its companion splits at the same point.

Duplicating a clip

Clip ▸ Duplicate makes a copy of the selected clip and places it right after the original on the same track. It’s a quick way to repeat a shot without going through copy-and-paste. Linked video and audio duplicate together as a fresh linked pair.

Turning a clip off without deleting it

Sometimes you want to silence or hide a clip without removing it — to try your edit without a shot, or to mute one clip while keeping the rest of the track. Select it and choose Clip ▸ Enable (Shift+E) to toggle it off.

A disabled clip stays in place but plays nothing — no picture, no sound — and is drawn dimmed on the timeline so you can see it’s off. Toggle Enable again to switch it back on. (The menu item shows a checkmark when the clip is enabled.)

The right-click menu

Everything above — and the speed, frame-hold, and other clip commands later in this guide — is also a right-click away. Right-click a clip to open a menu of the actions that apply to it:

The menu is shaped to the clip you clicked. A video clip adds the Frame Hold commands, Interpret Footage, and Multicam; an audio clip adds Normalize Audio. It’s often faster than reaching for the menu bar, because it only lists what’s relevant to that clip.

Fading a clip in or out

You can fade a clip right on the timeline, without adding an effect. Select a clip (with the Select tool) and you’ll see a small triangle handle in each of its top corners. Drag the left handle inward to fade the clip in, and the right handle inward to fade it out — the further you drag, the longer the fade:

There’s also a horizontal level line running across the top of the clip. Drag it up or down to set the clip’s overall opacity (for video) or volume (for audio). Ctrl-click the line to add a point, so you can shape the level up and down across the clip rather than setting one flat level.

Tip: These on-clip fades are the quick, visual way to fade. For a fade with an exact duration you can type in, or an audio-only fade, use the Fade effect instead — see Adjust the audio.

Changing a clip’s speed

Select a clip and choose Clip ▸ Speed / Duration… to play it back faster or slower. Type a percentage or click one of the presets, then Apply:

• Below 100% slows the clip down — 50% plays at half speed.
• Above 100% speeds it up — 200% plays at double speed.

Changing the speed changes how long the clip takes on the timeline — the footage itself doesn’t change, only how fast it plays. Speeding a clip up shortens it; slowing it down lengthens it. The Inspector’s Duration row updates to match:

Tip: You can also type a new percentage straight into the Speed row in the Inspector — no need to open the dialog for a quick change.

If the clip has linked audio, its companion clip speeds up or slows down with it, so picture and sound stay in sync.

Freezing a frame (frame hold)

Sometimes you want the video to pause on one frame — a freeze-frame ending, a beat before a title comes up, holding on a reaction shot — without leaving a gap or shortening anything else on the timeline. Sprocket calls this a frame hold, and it lives on the Clip menu, right below Speed / Duration:

Frame Hold Options… freezes the whole selected clip on one frame — the frame under the playhead by default, or its in point, or an exact source time you type in:

The clip’s length on the timeline doesn’t change — only what’s playing during it. Once applied, a HOLD badge appears on the clip and the Inspector’s Hold row shows the frozen frame and how long the hold lasts:

To release a hold, reopen Frame Hold Options…, clear the Hold on frame checkbox, and click OK.

Two related commands sit just below it on the same menu:

• Add Frame Hold splits the clip at the playhead and freezes only the second half on that frame — for holding on the last frame of a shot without affecting the part before the split.
• Insert Frame Hold Segment inserts a new, separate 2-second freeze of the playhead frame into the clip and pushes everything after it later — for adding a deliberate pause in the middle of a shot.

Tip: Frame hold only applies to video clips — it’s not available for audio.

Duplicate or remove a single frame (stop motion)

The last two commands in the frame-hold group work one frame at a time. They’re made for stop-motion-style work — repeating each frame so the footage plays “on twos” — and for micro-timing: adding or trimming a single frame so a cut lands exactly on a beat.

Select the clip, put the playhead on the frame you want, then:

• Clip ▸ Duplicate Frame inserts a one-frame freeze of that frame immediately after it, and everything after it on the timeline moves one frame later. Repeat it to hold the frame longer — duplicating twice plays the frame three times.
• Clip ▸ Remove Frame deletes that frame’s slice of the clip and closes the gap, so everything after it moves one frame earlier.

These are tiny edits — at a normal zoom you won’t see anything change. Zoom far in (Ctrl+=) and a duplicated frame shows up as its own miniature segment wedged into the clip:

The inserted segment is a regular frame hold — select it and the Inspector’s Hold row shows which frame it repeats.

Each command is a single undo step (Ctrl+Z puts the frame back), and neither is available on a clip that’s already frozen with a frame hold.

Tip: “One frame” means one frame of the clip’s original footage. On a slowed-down clip that frame plays for longer than one timeline frame, so the piece you add or remove is correspondingly longer too.

Getting around: Hand and Zoom

These two tools change your view without changing your edit:

• Hand — drag to pan the timeline left and right when your project is longer than the window.
• Zoom — click the timeline to zoom in for frame-accurate work; Alt-click to zoom back out.

You can also zoom with the – / + buttons at the top-right of the timeline (or Ctrl+- / Ctrl+=), and press Shift+Z to fit the whole project in view.

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Related

• Getting started — the basics of opening a project, selecting, splitting, effects, and exporting.
• Split a clip with the Blade
• Marks and markers — set an in/out range and drop markers.
• Titles, generators, and adjustment layers — add titles and other generated clips.
• Multicam and sequences — cut between angles, work with multiple timelines, and nest clips.
• Export your finished video