Hi,
I would think that this is simple and obvious operation, but I failed to figure out how to do it.
Let's say you have a clip and you want to create a gap in the middle, but without affecting the end time. In other software you would usually split the clip in two and trim the edges as desired, which creates a gap in the timeline. The trimming operation does not move the clips around, it allows you to either shorten the end of the first clip or shorten the beginning of the second clip, but the original positions of the clips as such stay where they were.
I am attaching a screencast from Kdenlive which shows what I am trying to achieve.
In Cinelerra, the trimming operation either causes the second clip to move to the left or it causes the first clip to get extended to the right, either way - it does not let you to keep both clip positions and only trim the edges, creating the aforementioned gap.
I read the docs and I thought that one of the options in Settings->Interface->Editing "Clicking on edit boundaries does what:" should do what I am looking for, but this was not the case.
What is the proper way to do it, what am I missing?
Kind regards,
Jin
First of all, I answer directly to your post since it works.
Ok, I understand better what you want.
I suggest you this method (see the video tutorial).
1-Select your region.
2-Create a silent zone by pressing the key "m" on the keyboard.
3-While holding the middle mouse button, drag the edge of the clips.
@fary54 made a video of one way to do this and it is at:
Or there is some possibilities at:
https://cinelerra-gg.org/download/CinelerraGG_Manual/Split_View_in_Compositor_Us.html
Hi @phylsmith2004,
thank you for pointing me to the post of @fary54
To be honest, I did not quite understand how the split view is related? I think its just another way to view the trimming, but the basic functionality is the same as when doing it directly in the timeline? Or am I mistaken?
That's what I mentioned in my post when I pointed to the docs - I did try to map each of the offered "modes" (they are also described in the SplitScreen link that you pointed me to) to LMB to see if it does what I want, but it didn't, either the second part of the clip was automatically moved to the left, so that it filled the gap, or the first part of the clip got extended to the right. There were some differences in what was happening, depending on the selected mode, but none of them achieved what you can see in my Kdenlive screencast example.
Also, in the screencast from @fary54 the second clip is just being manually moved to the right in order to create the gap, which is exactly what I am trying to avoid - I am trying to keep the second clip in place so that it stays synchronized to another track as if it was one coherent uncut clip, it should not change its position. It's literally, splitting and trimming edges, without moving anything, just like in my screencast... Just as if you had a film fixated on your table and you'd cut a few frames out of it in the middle, but kept the rest as is...
Kind regards,
Jin
Hi @fary54,
I think commenting does not work if you are not logged in, then clicking on "Add a comment" simply does nothing, happened to me just now, I thought I was logged in, but could not comment - turned out I wasn't.
Anyway, thank you for your video, it works as you described!
So, it seems that one important aspect is the "mute zone" thing, just splitting the clip is not enough and this is what I have been missing during my attempts.
I have to say, at least to me this it's not very intuitive, I would have expected for it to also work like that when just splitting the clip, I wonder what the reasoning is on why splitting is different from muting in regard to trimming edges? I would not have come up with this solution myself despite reading the docs and this is what worries me somewhat.
Thanks again for your help!
Kind regards,
Jin
A late response from @andreapaz that I am posting because there is other information included.
I too, like fary54, think that what you need is the Src Only (Slip) trim.
(@Phyllis: Perhaps there is confusion with the wording "Button 1-2-3."
Perhaps it is better to replace it with LMB; RMB and MMB which stands
for Left-Right-Middle Mouse Button)
@Jin: I am not familiar with Kdenlive, and in your video (gap.mp4) I
cannot interpret the havana color clip. The canvas, and therefore the
gap, is blue; the previous and subsequent clips are black; the havana
space is what? When you do trim on the edges of the two new black
clips resulting from the cut (scissor) the havana spaces at the edges
shrink. I don't understand what they represent...
Hi @,
since I tried all of the modes there was no confusion between LMB/RMB/MMB for me, it really did not work - unless you first mute the zone as @fary54 has shown and then of course you have to use the right mode; but none of the modes will work like that if you just split, you have to mute!
My screencast is perhaps a bit unfortunate in the sense that I used a black image as a video sequence. The first and last black thumbnails are the first and last frame of the video, the stuff between the thumbnails is the clip. Kdenlive does not show the preview of the whole clip in the timeline (did not check if this is configurable), only the first and last frames.
Let me redo the screencast with something that is better visible. So here you see what the first and the last frame is, the light blue between that is just the clip body representation. I split the clip in half and you can immediately see that by the end-start frame thumbnails that are appearing as we now have two clips instead of one after it has been split, then I just drag the edges around as needed. The dragging is similar to what I would do in Cinelerra, with the difference that in Cinelerra it requires me to mute a region instead of splitting.
Please let me know if it is clearer now, otherwise I will make a screenshot and add some descriptive text to it.
Kind regards,
Jin
Cut or Split in CinGG is different from other NLEs. CinGG has an internal timeline optimization that causes two adjacent frames to merge into a sequence, losing the cut. For more details see:
In order to create a split CinGG creates hard edges that are uneditable. This is why fary54 advised you to create a gap (even a few pixels, at most just one). This way you do not create the hard edges and can do the resizing you requested via Slip. The technique is different but the result is the same as the one you seek.
CinGG works very differently from other NLEs (it was originally based on Avid Media Compositor, but has diversified a lot from that as well), so it needs to learn how to use it from scratch. That is why we are always trying to deepen and improve the manual more and more.
Hi @andreapaz,
Cut or Split in CinGG is different from other NLEs. CinGG has an internal timeline optimization that causes two adjacent frames to merge into a sequence, losing the cut. For more details see:
oooh OK, the link you posted explains exactly what I was seeing. I guess what would have been helpful in the docs - a link from the Trimming section - this is where I tried to get the info on how to trim the edges, to the above link. It was not obvious that trimming depended on how something was being cut, so I would not have thought to look there myself.
CinGG works very differently from other NLEs (it was originally based on Avid Media Compositor, but has diversified a lot from that as well), so it needs to learn how to use it from scratch. That is why we are always trying to deepen and improve the manual more and more.
I noticed 😉 I did hold back on saying that, but since you mentioned it - I have to be honest, Cinelerra is the most unintuitive NLE that I have ever used... I remember using Media100 many, many years back and the workflow was just so much smoother. So I do struggle a lot now, spending more time on figuring out how I can do basic things instead of spending it on the creative process. That being said - you guys are a great help on the forums and also the video tutorials from @igorbeg are very helpful - although not quite enough, it's really difficult to get started and I always seem to miss how to do the simplest things, which are often not part of any tutorial. It is also difficult to find answers to "why" certain things are happening and how to figure it out, at least I often feel searching for a needle in a haystack. In that sense, while the documentation is extensive and is a great reference, it does not always help someone who has just started. This thread is an example for that - technically the cutting and the trimming are both well documented, but I still could not figure it out without getting help 🙁
I assume that I'll struggle less once I have built up a certain level of knowledge, but it will surely be a fight to get there. The reason why I am staying on it is quite simple though: I did not find anything else on Linux that would be open source and capable of doing all the things that I wanted to do in my videos and I did look at a bunch of Linux NLEs.
Hope that was not too much of unsolicited feedback, I guess my experience is most likely similar to other users who were just getting started 🙂
Kind regards,
Jin
Don't worry, all your points are correct (thanks also for the advice to put the link to Cut and Trim, I will do that as soon as possible).
The CinGG user community is very small and we got to know the developer Good Guy (and Phyllis) well. This has allowed us to compact and be supporters of the CinGG way of editing. I always told an anecdote that has stayed with me: I asked GG for a way to be able to draw on the canvas; he said he had no idea how to do it. However, a week later he brought out the Sketcher plugin that does just what I requested. So many other plugins and functions came out of from user requests. What a great coder (and persona) Good Guy was.
True, CinGG is unusual and counterintuitive, but it allows one to find and invent many ways (all manual...) to achieve a given result. It is also very feature rich. Perhaps the richest of the open programs for Linux, but I am not familiar with the other NLEs. Probably, now that my cognitive abilities are diminishing, I don't think I would be able to learn CinGG anymore.
Hi @andreapaz,
I am actually surprised about the CinGG community being small as there is no other feature-wise comparable NLE under Linux. Then again, probably most folks who do serious editing are on Mac anyway and other Linux alternatives are all good enough for cutting the occasional holiday video...
I did not know about CinGG history and was very sorry to read about what happened, so is Phyllis developing alone now? It's a lot of code to maintain...
You are right about CinGG being the most complete and feature rich NLE on Linux, at least that's what my personal research has shown. Blender has potential, but it has a different focus, Natron is great for special effects but it's not an NLE. Others, like Kdenlive, have a nice workflow and are intuitive to use, but each time I had an "I would like to edit it like that" situation which was beyond simple family video requirements - they failed due to various limitations.
Anyhoo, thanks to everyone who is working on the project, I hope that the user base is still large enough to motivate the developers to go on. I have been running a bigger open source project long time ago and I know how much work it actually is, so I really appreciate what you guys are doing here.
Kind regards,
Jin
A good reference to learn about the history of CinGG is here:
http://cinelerra-cv.wikidot.com/main:about
The wikipedia page is also done very well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinelerra
One can also see its troubled history of forks and divisions. This partly explains being able to bring together only a small community. To this we must add an unwelcome GUI (old style and separate windows) and an anti-intuitive workflow. Phyllis manages the whole project, but there are 2 or 3 developers left.
A curiosity; how did you meet CinGG?
A word of warning: the forum is mostly frequented by casual users and little by the "old" community. If you have questions and problems I encourage you to use the mailing-list and Bug Tracker, which are the center of the discussions we have.
To this we must add an unwelcome GUI (old style and separate windows)
I happen to like the GUI, it's a darn sight more flexible and easier to use than any others I've tried.
thank you for the links, will read up on it, I think I did try the original Broadcast2000 *long* time ago, but back then I had access to the Media100, so you can imagine that I did not do well with Broadcast2000 which was odd to use and looked totally ugly on TclTk 🙂
A curiosity; how did you meet CinGG?
Oh that is quite easy to answer, there aren't so many non proprietary open source NLE options on Linux, if you cross off the most simple and basic ones, then the list shrinks to just a few. For a while I was getting by with a combination of Natron and Kdenlive, for instance, I was editing material for a YouTube short, since its a narrow vertical view I had to crop the edges, but then also pan around to follow the action in the video which would otherwise leave the view area. In Kdenlive I did not manage to do both... I could either pan or crop; in theory both effects were supported on top of the other, but I could not achieve the result I wanted. So I ended up rendering the crop + pan part in Natron and then importing it into Kdenlive to combine with other tracks/audio effects.
CinGG could do it, yes, it was a struggle and I was not able to figure it out just by intuitive trial and error, but it cold do it. Same goes for the picture in picture, zoomed, cropped and with an added border, I think that was my first thread here on the forms. Again, I was not able to figure it out on my own, but CinGG could do it.
A word of warning: the forum is mostly frequented by casual users and little by the "old" community. If you have questions and problems I encourage you to use the mailing-list and Bug Tracker, which are the center of the discussions we have.
Oh OK, then I should probably subscribe. I was anyway going to look at the bugtracker since I have a nicely reproducible coredump when hitting the "Fit all autos to display" button in my project.
I happen to like the GUI, it's a darn sight more flexible and easier to use than any others I've tried.
My personal struggle is lesser the UI itself, although I would have preferred a single window, but rather how certain things behave - in most cases unexpectedly for someone who is used to other NLEs. The UI as such isn't bad, actually the UI is similar to what one would expect, but the way you have to do things is something I need to get used to.
"I have a nicely reproducible coredump when hitting the "Fit all autos to display" button in my project."
We need the exact set of steps so we can reproduce and hopefully fix?
@andreapaz perhaps you have a hint for me, before logging in I could view https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/bugtracker/view.php?id=632 just fine, but after I logged in (I wanted to answer to your comment), clicking on the above link always redirects me to my_view, instead of showing the issue. Any ideas why this is happening?
Since you could not reproduce the crash, I wanted to add a note, that it may be Fedora specific, my wife is running Fedora 37 as well and the crash happens for her as too.
Phyllis uses Fedora, we will hear if she can reproduce the crash.
However, I use Arch Linux (Rolling Release) so my test is not very reliable. Let's hear other opinions as well...
With the Forum we often have log problems; but with MantisBT, it is strange. It had disconnection problems after a short time, but it should be fixed now. Let's hear what @Phyllis and @Sam who are in charge of the server have to say.
