Working the timeline

Scrubbing vs selecting

The ruler scrubs: click or drag on it to move the playhead. Clips select: clicking a clip never moves the playhead, so you can’t lose your place by grabbing the wrong thing.

Selection

• Click a clip to select it (its lane’s inspector opens).
• ⌘A selects every clip. Drag any one of them and the whole arrangement slides together — the way to open up room at the start or close it at the end.
• ⌘-click or ⇧-click toggles a clip in and out of the current selection, Finder-style. Works on audio bars too.
• Drag on empty lane space for a rubber-band selection.
• Esc clears the selection (and exits drawing modes).

A multi-selection drags as a block: every clip keeps its own spacing and shifts by the same amount.

Moving and trimming

• Drag a clip anywhere on its bar — the whole bar is the handle. Drag vertically to change lanes. Clips snap to each other’s edges and the playhead; hold ⌥ to drop exactly where you point.
• Scrubbing snaps too — to clip edges, cuts, zoom starts and flags. Hold ⌘ while you drag the playhead and it lands exactly where you point, for the frame just before the click or the breath after the word.
• Drag a clip’s edge to trim. Trims are non-destructive: pull the edge back out and the footage returns.
• Duration field (Video tab → Timing): type an exact length. When the clip stands alone on its stretch — an intro, a standalone segment — everything after it slides to follow the new length, so shortening never leaves a hole. A clip sitting on top of footage (a logo, an overlay) trims in place.

Linked clips

A recording arrives as a screen bar and a camera bar that move and trim as one — they were filmed together, so editing one should edit the other. When that stops being what you want, right-click a clip and Unlink it: a camera that holds while the screen is cut, or a screen shortened without losing the face over it. Select two clips and Link Selected Clips puts them back together.

Deleting follows the same idea. Sound goes with the picture it was recorded with: delete a clip and its sound goes too, while a camera that was unlinked and is still on the timeline keeps its voice. Sound never attaches itself to another clip on its own, and detached audio keeps its own lane.

Entrance and exit

Right-click any clip for Entrance Animation and Exit Animation: a fade, or a slide from any side (a shape can draw itself on instead). Only the moves that kind of clip can make are listed, a tick marks the one in force, and None takes it away. Three quarters of a second by default; the duration slider lives in the panel for that clip — the Camera tab for the bubble, the Video tab for everything else.

A clip that fades takes its sound with it, so a fade-out ends in silence rather than a cut.

The microphone travels with the camera when there is one, so unlinking and moving the camera takes your voice, its waveform and its captions with it. A stretch with no camera over it keeps its sound on the screen, which is how a recording without a camera has always behaved.

Splitting and deleting

Action	Key	What happens
Split at playhead	T	Blade the clip in two — nothing is removed.
Split at pointer	⇧T	Same, where the mouse is.
Delete	⌫	Remove the selection and leave the gap. Never ripples.
Ripple delete clip	⌥⌘⌫	Remove the clip under the playhead, close the gap.
Cut previous clip	X	Ripple-delete the clip before the playhead on every lane it ends on, then close the hole once — rapid-fire cleanup while reviewing.
Delete selection, close gap	⇧⌫	Delete selected clips and close the gap.

Copy, paste, duplicate

⌘C / ⌘X / ⌘V work on clips: paste places the copied block at the playhead, preserving multi-selection spacing and lanes. ⌘D duplicates the selection and slides everything right to make room.

Speed

Select a range and apply a speed from the timeline’s speed control — 0.25× to 8×. Audio is retimed with the picture.

Markers

M drops a flag at the playhead. ⌥← / ⌥→ jump between flags, zooms and splits — the fastest way to hop through a long recording’s landmarks.

The view itself

⌘= / ⌘- zoom the timeline, ⌘0 fits it to the window, ⇧⌘T gives the timeline the whole editor height. The timeline never scrolls on its own — it stays where you put it.