{kdenlive} How do I join two adjacent clips into one in kdenlive?

video-editing
Szczepan Hołyszewski picture Szczepan Hołyszewski · Dec 30, 2017 · Viewed 9k times · Source

Suppose I made a mistake: I cut a clip into two using the scissor tool, and I did it off by a few frames. I want to undo the mistake and join the clips together again and split them at the right frame.

Please assume the case where a simple Undo won't work due to how broken the undo functionality is in kdenlive.

I have searched high and low, and found lots of answers that boil down to "you don't really need this, because for each and every thing you could possibly need it for, you can achieve the same goal without joining the clips together". Yes, it's possible, but its cumbersome and workaroundy and every subsequent operation on the affected time range requires twice as many clicks and twice as many attention registers.

I will accept an authoritative negative answer to the effect of "this is just not possible, full stop", coming from an expert who knows kdenlive through and through. Knowledge of impossibility is valuable. I will then know that I must be more careful to avoid the problem. For example, whenever I split a clip, I could back the uncut version on an unused track: a manually maintained undo stack. STILL better than constantly grouping and ungrouping and having to remember what must be grouped and what not.

Answer

Szczepan Hołyszewski picture Szczepan Hołyszewski · Apr 1, 2018

I found a very simple solution that was surprisingly difficult to discover due to my wrong way of thinking about clips.

TL;DR the solution if you cut a clip in two at the wrong frame:

  1. trust me and boldly delete the second clip
  2. resize the first clip so that it ends where the second clip ended (key observation: this does not "stretch" the clip!)
  3. cut it again at the right frame

Step 2 does not "stretch time" in the first clip. It only moves the clip's end position, which is just a time index into the source media. This is the "way of thinking about clips" part: they are "time windows" into the source media, and by moving a clip's right edge further to the right you are not making it play the same range of frames over a longer time, you are just making it play more frames from the source media.

Of course it is also possible to set a time scale for a clip but there's different UI for that.

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