Help moving clips on the video track

[bullseye0105]

Hi. I'm quite new to the world of video editing.

With the audio and overlay tracks I can move the clips around the timeline simply by dragging and droppping them where I want. I can't seem to do that with the video track, I can only switch the order of the clips but not move them freely to the time I want them, like if the software won't accept that I leave blank spaces between clips on this track.

Even if at the end there will be no blanks in my video, it would greatly help if during the editing process I could just move the clips around. So is there a way to do that and if not can you explain why I can do it on the other tracks but not on the video track??


Thank you

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums,

Clips added to the Main Video Track will always slide to the left, so there will not be any blank spaces. So if you want your clip to start at say 5 secs, you need to use a Color Clip found in the Graphic Organizer (Library). Drag a color clip to the Main Video track, then adjust the duration by grabbing the right or left handles, or by typing the duration in the digital input box, to 5 secs. Time notation for video is displayed as HH:MM:SS:FF (Hours:Minutes:Seconds:Frames. Notice that the right-most value is not fractions of seconds, but Frames). Now to further break that down, if you're in an NTSC country (USA, Taiwan), there would be 29.97 frames for every second of video, PAL (UK and most other places) has 25 frames per second.

So now you have a 5 sec color clip in the Main video track, insert your video clip adjacent to the color clip. Your video will appear to start 5 secs into your production. If you're wanting your video clip to Fade-in, use a Black color clip, then grab your video clip and drag it to the left so it overlaps the color clip. VS should add a transition between them.

[bullseye0105]

Thank you that's very helpful !