Trimming the length of a video

Hey there, in this video were going to look at trimming the length of your video in after effects. So we've got a video that’s, I've shot yesterday at the office and I need to trim it up. So what id like to do is bring it in here, trim it up and then through the next few videos just tidy it up a little bit.

So lets bring in the video, I've got a new project open, so we can double click in this one or we can go the long way, import files, and I'm going to find on my desktop after effects files in here there's Dublin Bring Your Own Laptop office, alright. Great, were going to make a new comp from it. Now you'll see this one here, I shot this yesterday with a DSLR camera, not a very good one.

So were going to have to do some fixing up, it’s a bit jumpy and needs trimming up. So lets right click it, lets go to comp, it’s a standard definition or 720p high and there's my comp there. Great, its loaded it down here and you'll notice if I play it through, first of all its got sound, I want to get rid of that because I don’t need it, so get rid of sound, there's the little mute button here, gone. Next thing id like to do is trim it up, so I'm going to scrub through and its just me walking through the office very badly, you can see its all very jumpy and this is what happens when you’ve got like my dslr, its new enough, it’s the rebel I think they call it the rebel something, the rebel something in America but its called the 760 here in Europe. But anyway, it’s not great for wandering around for, wandering around and recording video.

So what I want to do is maybe trim off this beginning bit, because there's lots of bits where I'm just starting off slow so maybe after about 4 seconds. Put in 400 here, it jumps to 4 seconds zero frames and we’re going to trim it up. And were going to use this thing called the work area. So this thing here, this work area its this dark, the thicker of the two bands. Don’t touch this top one, it does some weird stretchy scaling, zooming in thing. Use this one here, if you hover above it you can see it’s the work area, drag it across, hold shift and it'll snap to it, so that’s going to be my work area. Now what we do is we use the work area to trim it up. So think of, you can use this to crop it up, you can use this work area for lots of things, and we’ll explore it during this class but its really good for trimming video. It’s going to come along until I get to about here, I don’t need this last bit. It’s just a bit long. And I'm going to drag that in, hold shift, and snap it there. Now the easy thing is to go up to composition, there's one that says trim comp to work area, great.

So the physical mp4 that we brought in from our desktop is still fine, its still an mp4, its not going to be trimmed so we've just trimmed the comp down to match our little work space area and now what we need to do is export it. So now we go to composition and we go to add to media queue or file export, add to media encoder and you render it out and ready to go. What I'm going to do now is not render it just yet, I'm going to hold on for the next couple of videos because I want to show you some other things we can do to tidy this up. Alright that’s how to trim your video using after effects.