Premiere Pro · Cutting and the timeline
How to trim clips in Premiere Pro
Short answer
Drag the start or end of the clip with the Selection tool. To trim and close the gap in one move, park the playhead and press Q to ripple trim the start to it, or W to ripple trim the end.
In Premiere Pro
01
Drag an edge
With the Selection tool (V), hover over the clip's start or end until the trim cursor appears, then drag. This leaves a gap.
02
Ripple trim to the playhead
Park the playhead where the clip should start and press Q, or where it should end and press W. Premiere trims and pulls the rest of the sequence along.
03
Ripple trim by dragging
Press B for the Ripple Edit tool and drag an edge. Later clips move to fill or make room.
04
Roll an edit
Press N for the Rolling Edit tool and drag the cut between two clips. One clip gets longer and the other shorter, so the sequence length doesn't change.
05
Trim by frames
Select an edit point and press Option+Left or Right on Mac, or Ctrl+Left or Right on Windows, to trim one frame at a time.
Eddie AI
Do it in Eddie
Eddie trims from the chat or from the transcript.
Ask "Start on her second sentence" or "Tighten the ending", or trim by hand: drag a clip's edge on Eddie's timeline, or use the arrow keys for one frame and Shift for one second.
Back to Premiere
Open the edit, click Export and choose Premiere. You get a Premiere project (.prproj) or the older Premiere XML. In the desktop app, Send to Premiere Pro builds the edit inside Premiere through Eddie's panel, which the app installs for you.
If you imported the footage through the desktop app, the timeline points at your original camera files, so Premiere relinks to them. If you uploaded on the web or pulled from cloud storage, it points at Eddie's proxy media; relink to those, not to the camera originals.
From the help center
Questions
- What does Q and W do in Premiere?
- Q ripple trims the clip's start to the playhead and W ripple trims its end.
- How do I trim without moving other clips?
- Use the Selection tool or the Rolling Edit tool, which don't change the sequence length.