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Drag and Drop Editing

To enable the drag and drop editing mode on the timeline, select the arrow toggle on the control bar at the top of the main program window. Drag and drop editing is a quick and simple way of working in CINELERRA-GG, using mostly only the mouse. The basic idea is to create a bunch of clips , then drag them in order into the timeline, thus building prototype media that you can watch in the compositor. If after watching it, you wish to re-arrange your clips, set effects, add transitions or insert/delete material, just drag and drop them on the timeline.

To simply get started, perform the following operations which are useful for working in a drag and drop editing session. First load your media by using the main menu File pulldown and choose Load files; make sure the insertion mode is set to Create new resources only . This loads the files into the Resources window .

1. Create some video and audio tracks on the timeline using the Video and Audio pulldowns.
2. Open the Media folder in the Resources window. Make sure the necessary tracks are armed and drag a media file from the Resources window to the timeline . If the media has video, drag it onto a video track or if just audio, drag it onto an audio track. For a still image, drag it onto a video track.

You can also drag multiple files from the Resources window. When dropped in the timeline they are concatenated. If you have Display Icons selected in the Resources window, drawing a box around the files selects contiguous files. If you have Display Text selected, Ctrl-clicking on media files selects additional files one at a time; Shift-clicking on media files extends the number of highlighted selections. In addition to dragging media files, if you create clips and open the clip folder you can drag clips onto the timeline.

CINELERRA-GG fills out the audio and video tracks below the dragging cursor with data from the file. This affects what tracks you should create initially and which track to drag the media onto. To drag and drop a file on the Program window, you need to create on the timeline the same set of tracks as your media file.

When you drag your chosen media from the media folder to the timeline, your mouse pointer will drag a thumbnail and, once over the timeline, the outline of a white rectangle, as big as the edit you are going to have appears. Drag the media to the desired position of an empty track of the timeline and drop it. If there are other edits on that track, when you move the white outline over an edit, you will see a bow tie symbol appearing at edit boundaries. If you drop the media there, the new edit will start from the edit boundary indicated by the center of the bow tie .

Since the mouse pointer is in the middle of the white outline, when this rectangle is bigger than the visible part of the timeline, it is quite cumbersome to precisely insert it for long media. Lengthening the duration visible in the timeline by changing the sample zoom in the zoom panel will reduce the size of the white rectangle, making a precise insertion possible.

When you drag and drop edits within the timeline:

- If you drop an edit when bow ties are shown, that edit will be cut and pasted starting at the edit boundary indicated by the center of the bow tie . Following edits on the same track will move.
- If you drop an edit when there are no bow ties shown, the original edit will be muted and pasted where you dropped it. No edits will move. A silence will appear in place of the original edit.
- If you have more armed tracks on the timeline than in the asset you are dragging, only the following edits of the tracks affected by the drag and drop operation will move to the right. This will cause loss of synchronization . To restore it, disarm the tracks affected by the drag and drop operation, highlight the just dropped edit and paste silence over it using the Edit pulldown, Paste Silence.

Labels sometimes work differently in Drag and Drop editing mode in that you can't drag and drop them. They might be locked to the timebar , even with the Edit labels option enabled. Although with the Edit labels option enabled, if a selected area of a resource is spliced from the Viewer to the timeline in a position before labels, these labels will be pushed to the right for the length of the selected area.

In/Out points can be used to perform Cut and Paste operations in Drag and Drop mode as well as in Cut and Paste mode. Use the Edit pulldown to view the list and their keyboard shortcuts.

Subsections

- Copy/Paste Behavior
- Snapping while Cutting and Dragging
  - Cutting/Snapping edits
  - Drag Snapping
- Copy/Paste clips/medias across Multiple Instances
- Grouping edits
- Dragging Groups
- Selection Methods