Reference Manual

CHAPTER 20. WORKING WITH VIDEO 275
20.4 Video Trimming Tricks
Commonly, composers receive movie les with a few seconds of blank space before the
real beginning of the action. This pre-roll (two-beep) serves as a sync reference for
the mixing engineer, who expects that the composer's audio les will also include the same
pre-roll. While working on music, however, the pre-roll is in the composer's way: It would be
more natural for the movie action to start at song time 1.1.1 and SMPTE time 00:00:00:00.
This can be accommodated by trimming video clips, as follows.
First, we drop a movie le at the start of the Arrangement (1.1.1).
A Video Clip at the Start
of the Arrangement.
Next, we double-click on the video clip's title bar to display its contents in the Clip View.
There, we drag the Start Marker to the right so the video clip starts at the beginning of the
action.
Dragging the Start
Marker behind the
Pre-Roll.
Now, both the action and the music to be composed start at 1.1.1 / 00.00.00.00. Once the
music is done and ready to be rendered to disk, we need to bring back the pre-roll: