Every great video is not just made with what you include, but also with what you remove. Cutting and trimming are the most fundamental and essential skills in video editing. They allow you to tighten your narrative, remove errors, and eliminate awkward pauses (often called “dead air”), resulting in a professional and engaging final product.

Whether you’re editing a vlog, a presentation, a short film, or a YouTube tutorial, mastering these simple techniques will dramatically improve your workflow and your content’s quality.

First, Know the Goal: Why We Cut and Trim

• Remove Mistakes: Obvious flubs, mispronounced words, coughs, or off-topic rambles.
• Eliminate Dead Air: Those long, silent pauses between sentences, moments when someone is thinking, or gaps where nothing happens. This keeps the pacing tight and holds the viewer’s attention.
• Improve Pacing: To make the story flow better by shortening long pauses or rearranging clips for a more logical sequence.
• Save Time: Literally. Cutting unnecessary parts makes your video shorter and more impactful.

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Essential Technique 1: The Basic Cut (Using the Razor Tool)

This is your most used tool for chopping a single clip into multiple parts, allowing you to remove the middle section.

How to do it:

1. Locate the Problem: Scrub through your timeline with the playhead to find the start and end of the mistake or silent pause.
2. Make Your Cuts: Select the Razor Tool (usually an icon of a knife or scissors, often shortcut C).
3. Click with the Razor Tool where the mistake begins and then again where it ends. This will create two cuts, isolating the bad section.
4. Switch back to your Selection Tool (shortcut V).
5. Click on the now-isolated bad segment to select it. It will be highlighted.
6. Press the Delete key on your keyboard.

What you’re left with: A clean clip with a gap in the middle.


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Essential Technique 2: Trimming (Dragging Edges)

Trimming is a more refined way to shorten a clip from either its beginning (head) or end (tail) without making internal cuts.

How to do it:

1. Hover your mouse over the very beginning or end of a clip in the timeline.
2. Your cursor icon should change into a red bracket with an arrow (often called a “trim handle”).
3. Click and drag inward to shorten the clip. Dragging the left edge removes time from the start; dragging the right edge removes time from the end.
4. Release the mouse button. The clip is now shorter.

Perfect for:

• Removing a few seconds of silence at the start of a sentence.
• Cutting off an unfinished word or breath at the end of a sentence.
• Quickly tightening up a clip without adding extra cuts.

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The Crucial Next Step: Closing the Gap

After you’ve made a cut and deleted a section, you’ll be left with an empty gap in your timeline. If you play your video now, the screen will go black for that moment, and the audio will go silent—which is almost always undesirable.

How to fix it:

• Right-click on the gap and select “Delete Ripple” or “Close Gap” (the exact term varies by software: in Premiere Pro it’s “Ripple Delete,” in DaVinci Resolve it’s “Delete with Ripple,” and in iMovie it happens automatically).
• This magical command not only deletes the gap but also automatically shifts all the following clips to the left, snugly joining them to the previous clip. This preserves the seamless flow of your video.

Pro Tip: Learn the keyboard shortcut for “Ripple Delete” in your software—it will save you an enormous amount of time.

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Putting It All Together: A Practical Workflow

Let’s say your presenter says: “Okay, so the next step is to… um… I mean, let me start over… The next step is to plug in the cable.”

1. Preview: Watch the clip and note where “um… I mean, let me start over…” begins and ends.
2. Cut: Use the Razor Tool (C) to cut before the “um” and after “over…”.
3. Delete: Select the bad middle section with the Selection Tool (V) and hit Delete.
4. Close the Gap: Right-click the resulting gap and choose “Ripple Delete”.
5. Trim (Optional): The transition between the two good parts might feel a bit jumpy. You can trim the end of the first clip and the beginning of the next clip to create a smoother, more natural jump cut.

Final Tips for a Clean Edit

• Use Your Ears: Often, dead air is more audible than visual. Listen for breaths and pauses between words.
• Zoom In: Zoom in on your timeline for more precise cutting, especially when working with fast dialogue.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Learning the shortcuts for the Razor (C) and Selection (V) tools will massively speed up your process.
• J-Cuts are Your Friend: Sometimes, a harsh cut can feel abrupt. Consider using a J-cut (where the audio from the next clip starts before the video) to smooth over an edit, making the removal of dead air feel even more natural.

Cutting and trimming are the true “editing” in video editing. By diligently removing the flubs and the silence, you show respect for your viewer’s time and craft a video that is confident, clear, and compelling. Now, open your software and start cleaning up your timeline