Once your pointer has switched to the pairs of arrows, you can click, hold, and drag the edge of the clip left or right. When you are right at the edge, your pointer will change from the usual arrow icon to a pair of arrows pointing left and right, as highlighted by the red arrow in the screenshot below. To trim a clip, move your playhead to the edge of the clip you want to trim.

How to Trim Clips in iMovie Macįirst, what do we mean by “ trimming”? Nothing more than just shortening or lengthening your clip by a little bit, so you have just the part you want in your final movie. This can be an incredibly quick way to confirm if you put your playhead in exactly the spot that you’d like to make your cut. This locks the playhead on the spot.īonus Pro Tip: Once you have placed your playhead where you (think) you want to split the clip, you can press the left and right arrow keys to move your playhead one frame left or right. Pro Tip: If you find placing the playhead where you want to split the clip is a little unstable, with the slightest bump to your mouse moving your playhead while you are trying to find the Command + B keys (it happens), then click on that spot.

Either method has the same effect.Īnd a quick reminder: iMovie shows you the keyboard shortcut ( Command + B, in this case) to the right of every menu option – just in case you forget it. Note that instead of pressing Command + B you can also position your playhead, then select Split Clip from iMovie’s Modify menu. You can now see a gray gap (highlighted by the red arrow in the screenshot below) between the two resulting clips right where you split the clip, signifying these are now separate clips. Step 2: Press Command + B to split the clip.Īnd with that simple keystroke, where there was one (clip), now there are two. In the screenshot below, I placed my playhead (the vertical white line highlighted by the red arrow) on the frame I want to split, right before the camera angle changes from a closeup of a Famous Actress to a wide shot of the room she is in. Step 1: Move your playhead to the spot you want to split your clip. So how do you split a clip? In two easy steps: Once it is separated (split from the original clip) you can move it by dragging and dropping it where you want it to go or delete it simply by clicking on it and hitting Delete. To move part of a clip, or delete part of a clip, you start by splitting the clip at both the start and end of the segment you want to move or delete. Or, you want to split a clip because there is a segment within a clip you don’t want or don’t need. Why would you want to split a clip? There are lots of reasons, but the most common is that you want to move just part of a clip to somewhere else in your movie.

How to merge clips in imovie