Clip

A clip is a piece of video footage on a video's timeline. Add one with the Video tile in Add — your newest video lands as another clip at the end of the timeline — and pick it by its row on the timeline or on the picture. A clip's first tab is Video — the reel of your own videos, opening with a search column whose rows are Mine, Starred and Community, and at the right end the footage it plays now: pick another and the clip plays that video instead, whole, from where it starts on the timeline, keeping its placement and the effects you gave it, while anything worked out from the old footage — its speed changes, reverse, stabilization and zoom — starts over — and, last, Transform, one row order every item shares: its Crop, flip, Reframe and Splice — Reframe reads which camera move the clip carries, and pressing it opens Reframe and Punch-in in the menu's place, then the tracking steps once you pick one; then Perspective, which you press to bring the tilt controls up on the clip and again to put them away, and which shows how far the clip leans, or On screen while those controls are up (with a reset while it is tilted), beside its Opacity; then one row holding the clip's own settings as sections you press to open — Speed (it opens to a Ramp button and, beside it, a slider showing the speed itself; press Ramp to shape a speed ramp over the video), Reverse, which switches with one press, and Stabilize, which opens to its Off/On switch and its Smoothness slider (greyed out while it is off) — so the whole menu is four rows tall at any width; and, at the bottom, where it sits, its size and its turn. Between them sits Animate, one strip: Presets, whole animations, each naming how the clip comes in, what it does while it is there and how it goes out — including how one clip blends into the next; Starred, the ones you starred; Path, the route a clip travels across the frame; Deform, which opens the Recipe on the handles that bend the picture — a Mesh, Liquify, Pins and Bones — and walk past it By depth; and Automate: any of its settings — its own scale, opacity, rotation and perspective tilt, or any effect's slider — changing over time as a curve you shape.

Stabilize — smoothing out camera shake — is one section of the settings row on a clip's Transform tab, beside Speed and Reverse: press Stabilize to open it, press its Off to turn it On, and the Smoothness slider beside it — greyed out while stabilizing is off — sets how strongly the camera's path is smoothed (steadier footage is cropped in a little more). It sits there rather than under Effects because it is something the whole clip does over its length rather than a look laid on top.

A clip's perspective is set on the picture itself. A picked clip's Transform tab has the same Perspective control a drawing's has: press it and a blue ring appears on the clip, tied to the clip's centre by a line, with a corner bracket on each of its four corners — brackets rather than round dots, so they never read as resize handles. Drag the ring — or anywhere on the clip — to tilt the whole picture, as if pushing that edge away from you; the line shows at a glance which way and how far it leans. Drag a corner bracket to move just that corner; a corner stops once it would fold the clip into an impossible shape, settling at the edge of what can be drawn rather than snapping flat. Double-click the ring to flatten the tilt, or a corner to put it back, and the arrow keys tilt it too. While the control is showing, the clip's resize handles and the buttons above it step aside, and Perspective stays lit and reads On screen; press it again, press Escape, leave the Transform tab or pick something else and the handles come back. That same Perspective control shows how far the clip leans, and while it is tilted, the reset button beside it flattens the clip in one step. A tilted clip's resize box fits around the tilted picture, with a faint outline of the shape it is drawn at, so resizing it keeps the tilt exactly as it was. The tilt can also change over time — Tilt X and Tilt Y are settings you can automate like the clip's scale or rotation.

Recolor and splice a clip

A clip also has Recolor, in the Adjust section at the start of its Effects strip: its card puts a Recolor layer on like any other effect — pick the colour to change straight off the video, then what it becomes — its colour ramp's Color 1, as far as Color ramp says — and confine it to part of the frame with its box. A drawing and a group take one too. Like any effect it gets a row on the timeline, so you can drag when it starts and stops, fade it in and out, or add a second recolour — each its own layer.

Two things need to READ the footage before there is anything to set, so each asks a short question or two first, and both are reached from the clip itself: Splice cuts a clip that is already there, so it is the Splice cell at the end of that clip's Transform tab's first row, opening the ways to cut in the menu's place; Retouch changes a face in the clip's own picture, so it sits in the Adjust section at the start of that clip's Effects strip. Each closes the moment the thing it makes exists, and its settings open along the bottom like everything else. A mask is not one of them: it goes down at once from the Add menu, and reads the footage only when you ask it to follow something.

Splice — cuts a clip into pieces. Press Splice on the clip's Transform tab and the ways to cut stand side by side in the menu's place, under a row that takes you back — Depth, Face, Body, Object and Plane — and one press on a way starts it: Depth reads the clip straight away, and a subject asks you, at the clip itself, to tap what to follow; the ✕ on the open way stops it. Each piece lands as its own clip on its own timeline row, and the set of them is grouped together — so a piece has everything an ordinary clip has: you can drag it around the frame on its own, trim it, change its speed, give it its own effects, and put an effect between two pieces so it only touches what is beneath it. The whole set still moves together as a group, and the atmosphere settings for the cut belong to that group, describing it as a whole — fog, defocus, a lamp, rays or a warm grade laid over the pieces according to how far apart you have set them. Pick a piece and its own settings gain a Cut section: the near and far edges of the slice it shows, how softly those edges fall off, and its Distance — where it sits in the group's atmosphere. Any clip can also take an edge treatment from the Edge section of its Border menu — the same treatments a drawing carries — and on a spliced piece it follows the cut edge rather than the whole frame. Cutting by Depth shows you the reading before it cuts: a preview of the frame with the measurement drawn over it (brighter is nearer, each shade one piece), a Pieces slider from two to six, and a Cut press that makes them. Nothing is cut until you press it, and changing the piece count re-shades the preview without re-reading the footage.

Where you can use a clip

• Video — Groups

What you can do with a clip you made

Star · Copy

Transform

• Reverse — Which file the clip plays: its footage as recorded, or the same footage reversed, played forward.
  • Forward · Reverse
• Smoothness — How steady a stabilized clip is made, from following the camera closely to very steady — steadier crops in further.

A clip's speed is its own time curve, set from the Speed section's slider and Ramp, and its Distance in a group's depth is every item's own, listed on the item settings page.