Trimming, splitting and reordering

Trim

Drag either end of a clip inwards. The clip gets shorter and the rest of the timeline closes up behind it, so there is no gap to tidy afterwards.

Almost every recording wants a trim at both ends: the second where you were reaching for the record button, and the second at the end where you were reaching back.

Split

Put the playhead where you want the cut and press S, or Ctrl+K. The clip becomes two clips, which you can then trim, delete or move independently.

The usual reason to split is to take something out of the middle. Split twice, either side of the part you do not want, click the middle piece and press Delete.

Delete

Delete or Backspace removes the selected clip and closes the gap. Hold Shift while you press it to leave the gap where it was, which is occasionally what you want.

Reorder

Drag a clip past its neighbour and the two swap places. Everything that belongs to the clip goes with it: its zooms, its captions, its overlays, and its share of the audio. That is what makes reordering safe. A clip is not a rectangle on a track, it is a piece of the video with everything that was attached to it.

What happens at the new joins

A cut in the middle of a take is visible, because the picture jumps. Two things soften it automatically. The pointer no longer teleports across a cut: it travels across the join, or fades if the jump is too far to travel plausibly. And you can put a transition on the join, which the timeline will not move anything to accommodate.