Roll edit
Also known as: rolling trim, roll trim
Moving the boundary between two adjacent clips, so one gets longer as the other gets shorter and the total length stays the same.
Updated
What it means
A roll edit moves a join rather than a clip. The outgoing shot gains frames and the incoming shot loses them, or the reverse, and only the boundary itself travels anywhere.
That property is what makes it the tool for timing. The sequence length is fixed, so every cut can be adjusted against music without anything downstream shifting out of place. That is rarer than it sounds.
It is the opposite trade from a Ripple edit, which changes length and leaves the join where it was relative to the action. The two are easy to confuse and behave differently.
How it works in practice
It is the main operation of a Fine cut. Each boundary gets rolled a few frames until the cut lands where the movement and the music agree, and nothing else notices.
Both clips need handles. Rolling right requires unused frames at the end of the outgoing shot, which is why generous trimming early leaves room later. A clip trimmed to the frame cannot be rolled.
It is also how a J-cut and L-cut gets built, by rolling the audio boundary away from the picture boundary rather than cutting both together. Sound arriving early or late is a roll rather than a separate edit.
What to watch out for
Rolling past the available frames does nothing, and applications differ in whether they say so. A roll that refuses to move is usually a handles problem rather than a bug in the application.
It can quietly break Continuity. Extending an outgoing shot can reveal the rider already starting the next movement, and two frames can give away the whole next trick.
Linked audio complicates it. Rolling picture with sound attached moves both, so a deliberate audio offset gets undone by a routine trim unless the link between them is broken first.
How RawClip handles it
Cut boundaries are chosen against the music and the action in one pass, which is the work a roll edit does by hand. A delivered sequence can still be adjusted this way in any editor when one specific join needs moving a few frames.