Timeline Tips
The Flixier timeline comes with powerful features that are usually part of desktop video editors, these features are super helpful in a variety of situations making your editing way simpler if you spend a couple of minutes to learn them. Here is a rundown of the most important ones:
Tracks
In video editing, tracks are horizontal layers on a timeline where audio and video clips can be placed and edited. Tracks are essential for organising and separating different types of media in a video project.
For example, in a typical video project, you might have one track for your main video footage, one track for background music, and one or more tracks for sound effects or text. You can add or remove tracks as needed, depending on the complexity of your project.
Tracks allow you to edit individual clips without affecting other clips in the same project. For example, you can adjust the volume or add effects to a specific audio clip without changing the volume or effects of other audio clips in your project. Similarly, you can trim or adjust the timing of a video clip on one track without affecting other clips on different tracks.
To open the track options section, check out the extend button on the top-left corner of your timeline, just over the “Cut” button. After you click on that button, you will have access to the advanced timeline track settings. You can add new tracks, hide or mute multiple clips in the preview, lock and remove them. You can also reorder tracks by dragging them up and down.
Ripple Split
Sometimes when editing, you may want to add something in the middle of a complex video that has a lot of assets overlapping on different tracks in the timeline.
Instead of cutting each clip manually, you can hold down the SHIFT key and use your left mouse button to move the playhead to the right. Ripple Split cuts the clips into two parts and moves the rest of the timeline to the right to create a gap.
Ripple Move
The Ripple Move function allows you to move an asset on the timeline along with every other asset to the right of it. This helps you move assets while maintaining their position relative to each other on the timeline.This feature is especially useful when you want to create a gap in the timeline but you have a lot of clips in it and moving them manually will take a lot of time.
To do a ripple move, select the clip in the timeline and hold down the SHIFT key, and use your left mouse button at the same time to drag the clips to your right.
To do a ripple move on multiple tracks, hold down CTRL using the left mouse button to select multiple clips on different tracks. Once you have selected them, hold down shift and move the clips to the left or right by clicking and dragging with the left mouse button.
Timeline Settings
The Flixier timeline settings can be found under the Tracks menu on the lower left of the screen or through keyboard and mouse shortcuts in some cases.
- Object size - This slider allows you to change the vertical size of each timeline track. Making the tracks smaller can help keep things visible when you’re working on complex projects where you need to fit a lot of tracks on the timeline.
- Auto in-between transition and Default in-between transition - These settings allow you to choose whether you want a transition to be added when two clips overlap on the same track in the timeline. You can also choose which transition you want Flixier to add by default.
- Show waveforms - allows you to choose whether or not you want to see the audio waveform displayed along with the video thumbnails on the timeline.
- Object names - toggles the names of media objects on and off in the timeline.
- Snap - this system helps you align clips in the timeline relative to other clips or to the play head. Click on the blue Snap button to enable disable it.
Groups
You can organise entire tracks under a single group by dragging the track on the created group. To create a group, you can select the “+Add” option on the left part of your timeline.
A benefit of using groups is that you can adjust the timing of all the tracks in the group at once. For example, if you want to move a section of your project earlier in the timeline, you can select the group and drag it to the left. This will move all the tracks in the group earlier in the timeline.
You can also collapse groups meaning that you can hide tracks you don’t want to see making it easier to work with more complex timelines.
