Slide edit
Also known as: slide, slide trim
Moving a clip along the timeline so it sits earlier or later, with its neighbours absorbing the change and the total length unaffected.
Updated
What it means
A slide moves a clip bodily along the Timeline. The clip itself is untouched, and the shots on either side grow and shrink to accommodate the new position. Three clips change and only one of them deliberately.
It is one of four trim operations that get confused. Ripple changes length, roll moves a join, slide moves a clip, and slip changes what a given clip shows.
The use case is timing against music. A shot that needs to land half a beat earlier gets slid rather than retrimmed, which keeps its content exactly as it was originally chosen.
How it works in practice
It needs handles on both neighbours. Sliding left requires spare frames at the end of the previous shot, which is the same requirement a Roll edit has. Without them nothing moves.
Music is almost always the reason. A cut that should fall on the Beat grid and does not can be fixed by moving the clip rather than by trimming either side of it.
A Slip edit is the one to reach for when the problem is inside the clip instead. Slide fixes where a shot sits; slip fixes what that shot shows.
What to watch out for
The neighbours change without being asked. A slide that fixes one cut shortens the shot before it, and that shot may have had its own reason for its length. Two problems can quietly replace the one that was being fixed.
Sliding past the available frames fails silently in some applications. The clip stops moving and nothing explains why, which is normally a handles problem on one side or the other.
On a music-locked timeline it is safer than a Ripple edit. Nothing after the slide moves, so alignment further down the sequence survives intact, which is the whole argument for using it.
How RawClip handles it
Clip positions are chosen against the music while the sequence is assembled, so nothing has to be nudged afterwards to make a cut land. Adjusting one placement on a delivered sequence is ordinary timeline work in any editor that opens the file.