trim

After you’ve assembled your clips in rough chronological order in the timeline, you begin to fine-tune the cut point (or edit point) between each pair of contiguous clips. Any time you make a clip in a project longer or shorter, you’re trimming that clip. However, trimming generally refers to precision adjustments of anywhere from one frame to several seconds. If you’re adjusting clip durations by much larger amounts, you’re still trimming, but you may not be in the fine-tuning phase of editing yet.

In Final Cut Pro, you can use a variety of techniques to trim timeline clips and edit points, including ripple edits, roll edits, slip edits, and slide edits.