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The Premiere Elements Timeline works much like timelines you find in expensive
professional video editors, such as Premiere Pro.
It gives you more options than the Sceneline. One place that comes into play is when you
rearrange or insert clips on the Timeline. The Timeline has some default behaviors, some
standard behaviors in these instances that might go countered in what
you want to do. To bypass those default behaviors you use
keyboard modifiers. Keys you hold down as you manipulate a clip
with the mouse. There are only two keys that come into play
here, Ctrl and Alt. Let me add a few clips and show you what I
mean. I'm just going to grab some clips here in
a particular order, not necessarily for any important reason, but just to show
you that if you Ctrl-click on one clip and then another, and then another, and another,
and another, it will place those clips in that order on
the Timeline when you drag it down here. It won't be from top to bottom.
It'll be in the order you selected them. Now I'll click away, so they are unselected.
Five clips here. Let's look at the default behavior when you
drag a clip from a collection of clips in the Timeline. I'll take this clip
and I'll drag it to the end. The default behavior is that it leaves a gap.
And I showed you before that you can right-click and say Delete and Close Gap,
but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go Ctrl+Z to undo that edit.
This time I'm going to hold down a keyboard modifier to avoid having that gap appear.
Once I hover my cursor over that particular clip, you don't see any change to
the cursor, but hold down the Ctrl key, you get a little arrow pointing left for the
couple of little gray bars on each side of the arrow. With the Ctrl key down
that is saying, look it, if I now click-and-drag this guy out, like
that, I can let go the Ctrl key now,
it will fill the gap left by that clip. So I'll go to the end and it filled the gap
left by that clip. I can undo that and show that to you again.
I'm hovering here. Hold down the Ctrl key.
That little blue arrow appears saying that if you now drag this out and then
you can let go the Ctrl key after you drag it out,
it will fill the gap when you let go and insert this someplace else.
That's called a keyboard modifier and that's actually a doing a ripple delete,
is the technical term for what just happened there.
And also when you drag this guy out and move it to the end without the
keyboard modifier, that's a lift, and when you drag it out with the keyboard modifier,
that's an extract. Just so you know the difference, Lift and
Extract. So what about adding clips?
I go up here and just take this clip and drag it down inside here, and it shoves
them all over, as it should. That's the default behavior, but if I want
to let say cover up a clip in the Timeline, rather than shove them over, I can take this
guy, drag it down, and if I bring it over here, you'll notice that
the default behavior is that the arrow points to the right, and the clips slide over
to accommodate this new clip. But if I press the Ctrl key as I'm adding
it, it now points down, saying that nope, we are going to cover up.
We are going to record over whatever is in the Timeline at that point.
So here's the Ctrl key off the default behavior, meaning it will slide
the clips to the right. The down means it's going to cover it up,
doing an overlay edit. Notice nothing is still over to the right.
In fact, I cut that clip right there, and left part of it behind.
It just covered up whatever part of it would have equaled the length of the
clip that I just added. Let me undo that. Same thing applies when you are dragging clips
around inside this collection of clips. If I take this clip, hover my cursor over
it, and press down Ctrl, I'm going to now fill the gap.
I'm going to make an extract edit here. I'm going to drag that up. I'm going to hold
down the Ctrl key. When I place it back in the Timeline,
notice that there is a little blue arrow pointing down.
If I let go the Ctrl key, the default is this slide clips to the right.
That's an insert, but if I hold it down, that will be an overlay.
So the keyboard modifier when you are moving clips around in the Timeline
for Overlay is the Ctrl key. And I overlaid that, filled the gap, and in
actuality, shortened the entire length of the project.
I'll press Ctrl+Z to undo that. So let me show that again. Here it is.
I press down the Ctrl key. This is going to be an extract.
So I'm going to fill that gap. I'm holding down the Ctrl key still.
I'm going to put it here and that Ctrl key being down
means this is going to be an overlay, and shorten that project in the same process.
Now what happens if you have another track here of let's say audio or some more clips
on top? The behavior is typically when you do an insert,
it splits every track and shoves them all through the right, but you
probably don't want to do that if you have music in particular down there.
So I want to take this music and put it down in this track below here.
Let's see what the default behavior is. I'm going to take this guy, move it out of
the way, I'm doing just a lift here, and I'll do an insert here.
Notice there is a black line going through the audio clip.
It's going to cut the audio clip right there and slide it to the right and
that is definitely not something you want to have happen, when you are dragging
clips around on the Timeline. If we were doing this in the Sceneline it
would not cut that clip, but in the Timeline it does, and that is by design.
It's not like something went wrong when they designed this product.
This is expected behavior. You need to overcome that behavior with the
keyboard modifier. I'm going to go Ctrl+Z. Now I'm going to drag
that out. I'm going to hold down that keyboard modifier
Ctrl, such that it will fill the gap. I'm going to go over here, I'm going to do
an insert as I did before, which if I don't do anything now, it'll modify that.
It will cut the audio track. But I'm going to hold down the Alt key now
and watch what happens to the cursor. It has a little swish when I hold down the
Alt key, meaning that when I let go now, it will do an insert edit, but it will not
affect any clips on any other tracks. It did not cut the clip down here, the audio
clip. I'll show you that again. Hover over here, press Ctrl, so that we do
an extract, drag it out. I am going to go right here and I'm going
to do an insert edit. I'm not holding down the keyboard modifier
now. It will cut and slide everybody over, but
I'm going to hold down the modifier to make sure I don't affect any other tracks
by holding down the Alt key, and there you go.
It will not affect the audio track down here. The same is true if I want to add a clip from
up in a Project View. I'll just take this clip.
If I would have dragged it down here just like that, you would do an insert edit.
Now this is sliding everybody over, and it would cut the audio as well.
Not something you want to have happen. So do Ctrl+Z on that and now I'm going to
do it with a keyboard modifier. I'm going to drag it down here.
We'll have it do an insert edit, which is what we want.
I'll hold down the Alt key and it will not split the audio track. Notice there
is a little zebra striping below that little blue arrow that's telling you-- here is the
Alt. It's telling you, you are not going to affect
another track when you put this here. So it does the insert edit on that track only,
those audio video combination track, but does not affect the audio down here, or
the music. These keyboard modifiers might seem convoluted
and confusing at first, especially when you are holding down Ctrl
and Alt and dragging with the mouse. But these modifiers give you more control
over your edits than you have in the Sceneline.