Series Index Features You May Not Know About • Entry #7

Media Composer: Top and Tail Are Not on Your Keyboard Yet

By Infinite Creation · Media Composer · ~8 min

The Real-World Scenario

You are cutting an interview. Every answer needs its front trimmed to remove the question and the pause. So for each one you enter trim mode, grab the head of the segment, drag it to roughly the right place, play it back, adjust, and exit trim mode. Three hundred times.

Two commands exist to do exactly this in one keystroke. Most editors never use them because Avid ships them unmapped, so they appear nowhere on the keyboard and nowhere in the default interface. A feature you have to install on yourself before using stays invisible.

The Solved Feature: Top and Tail

What the two commands do

Top removes the material to the left of the position indicator in the selected segment. Tail removes the material to the right. Park the indicator where the answer begins, press Top, and the front is gone in one action with no trim mode and no dragging.

The pair covers most interview and documentary assembly, where the work is finding the real start and end of a usable line and removing everything else.

Mapping them, which you have to do yourself

Open the Command Palette from the Tools menu. Choose the Edit tab, where the Top and Tail buttons live. Select Button to Reassign, then drag each button onto the keyboard position you want on the Keyboard settings window.

Editors commonly place them near their existing trim keys so the whole operation stays under one hand. The mapping saves into your user profile and travels with it between systems.

The workflow it enables

The gain compounds on long-form work. Play a take, stop where the usable material starts, press Top. Play forward to where it stops being usable, press Tail. Two keystrokes replace an entire trim-mode cycle, and the edit stays in the same rhythm as watching.

Working this way also keeps you in playback rather than in a mode. Judging where a line starts is easier while listening than while dragging a boundary and guessing.

Pro Tips and Gotchas

Both commands act on the selected segment and the enabled tracks. Check your track selectors before pressing, or you trim picture and leave audio behind.
These commands remove material rather than moving edit points, so surrounding segments do not shift. Use them for assembly and normal trim for adjusting cuts in a locked sequence.
The Command Palette holds a large number of other unmapped commands. Reading the Edit and Play tabs once is worth the ten minutes.

Where This Fits

The wider discipline is covered in Video Production Fundamentals, the pillar guide for this area. This page is entry 7 in Features You May Not Know About, a series on capabilities shipping in software you already own.

Why this is worth mapping

Trimming the head and tail of a clip is among the most repeated operations in an edit, and doing it with a mouse costs a few seconds each time. Across an assembly of several hundred clips that is a substantial part of a working day spent on something a key press does instantly.

The wider point is that any operation you perform more than about fifty times in a project deserves a key. Watching which actions you actually repeat, rather than adopting somebody else's mapping wholesale, is what produces a layout suited to the work you do.

Map to keys you can reach without looking. A shortcut requiring a glance at the keyboard interrupts the same attention the shortcut was meant to preserve, which is why editors cluster their most-used commands under the resting position of one hand.

Vocabulary

Top and tail. Trimming material from the start and the end of a clip, leaving the middle. The most common trim in an assembly edit, and the reason it is worth a dedicated key rather than a mouse drag.

Keyboard mapping. The assignment of commands to keys, which most editing applications allow you to change. A mapping built around what you personally repeat is faster than any default, which is designed for nobody in particular.

Ripple. An edit where removing or adding material shifts everything after it, keeping the sequence closed up. The alternative leaves a gap, and choosing wrongly between the two is a common source of sync problems.

Rough cut. A sequence assembled from selected material with little refinement, made to establish shape before anything is polished. Speed matters more than precision at this stage, because most of what goes in will be trimmed or replaced.