How to touch up without messing up your timeline?
 

I have quite a full timeline, lots of L cuts and crossfades between sound and ambience tracks. The director wants one shot a bit shorter, however because of the timeline's structure I wont be able to ripple delete. Is the only way to do this successfully by moving all the clips manually? I have a few nested sequences that also has video and audio transitions between each other....Will that little trim cause a lot of grief?

What methods do you use to avoid this?

WHat are you cutting on? Different NLE's handle ripples differently.

PPro 2.

I have an ambient track for one scene that crossfades into the one of another and a couple of L cuts with some dialogue between two characters, so It's not really possible to ripple delete the whole timeline.

Trimming down one clip is gonna give a lot of hassles moving everything into place in regards to other clips that have been edited to the beat of a track.

Although I may be telling you to close the barn door after the cows have left.....

1) When I create the timeline, I use nested sequences. Like, scene 1 is one sequence, scene 2 is another sequence, etc... this way I have a lot of control and relatively short sequences to deal with.

2) I never mix audio in PPro. All my audio comes in as one wav file exported form Audition, granted, most of my audio is done in post, I shoot MOS. You have a lot more control by using only one audio file in PPro. Even if I use live sound I use audition to mix and master.

My work flow is about the same as I use in Flash and most of my organizational techniques come from that point of view, thus the nested elements, separate audio, video files, etc...

Other than that I use the the "M" and "V" key to move stuff around while locking and unlocking tracks.

One last thing I have found very helpful is my audio tracks, no matter when they start in the time line, always really start at TC 0. Even if I have 10 minutes of silence in front of where they go, I always start at zero. I hate trying to sync up audio over and over so I edit the audio right along with the video in audition. If the video changes, I re-import the video into audition and adjust the audio there, then output back to PPRo. But then, I don't have anyone asking me to edit the video timeline after it's done. I always finish the video edits, lock them down, the start on the audio, lock that, then start the foley, etc.... But if I do need to trim something it's not too bad, up to a point.

One thing that might work for you is to pull the main timeline into another sequence and trim it there????

Good luck,
Jon

Well, I do have a few seqeuences, but there are transitions between them so if I were to alter the clips in a sequence, it could interfere with the total length of the sequence and then cause problems with a dissolve.

It would be very useful to know just how much time we are talking about.

Mike

sorry, not much help...
 

Also, not to hard to make a copy of the project and try a few different things.
Every project is different so it's pretty hard to give a definitive answer to an abstract question. When in doubt, back up, make a copy, experiment....
Jon

About two seconds.

You can't just use the mutiple track select tool and move everything you need to at once?

So you don't have to cut or move anything, put in a fade to black and 2 seconds of black frames! All fixed. Extend a transition, properly.

Mike