Paste attributes, group and replace clips in Video by Zaweba

Repeated small jobs fill any edit: giving five clips the same grade, slowing a shot by a set amount, swapping a clip for a better take without losing its trims. Video by Zaweba has a set of clip tools for these jobs, each with a shortcut. Learn them and a lot of fiddly work turns into single key presses.

Paste insert and paste attributes

Copying and pasting clips is familiar. Paste insert, on Ctrl+Shift+V, pastes clips at the playhead and pushes everything after them along, rather than laying them over what is already there.

Paste attributes, on Ctrl+Alt+V, is the bigger time saver. Copy one clip, select others, and paste its attributes onto them: its effects, its look, its settings, rather than the clip itself. Grade one shot from a scene, then paste its attributes onto every other shot from the same camera. The same command can remove attributes, which is the quick way to strip a clip back to how it came in.

Speed, groups and labels

Ctrl+R opens Speed / duration for the selected clip. It is where you set a clip's speed or length by number rather than by dragging. Use it when a shot needs to be an exact length, or when a whole set of clips needs the same speed change. For speed that changes during a clip, use a speed ramp instead.

Ctrl+G groups selected clips so they move and select together. Groups suit things that belong together but sit on different tracks: a shot, its title and a sound effect, say. Moving one moves them all, so nothing gets left behind.

Clips can carry label colours. Use them for meaning: one colour for interviews, one for b roll, one for graphics, or a colour for clips that still need work. Like marker colours, they only help if you decide what each colour means and keep to it.

Match frame, replace and subclips

Shift+F is match frame. With the playhead over a clip on the timeline, it finds the same frame in the source, so you can see the rest of the shot around it. That is how you find a slightly longer version of a moment, or check what happened just before a cut.

Replace swaps a timeline clip for the file selected in the bin. The clip keeps its place on the timeline. It is the tool for upgrading: a better take, a version with a corrected grade from another program, or the final render of a graphic replacing a draft.

Subclips are pieces of a longer file saved as their own items. A long interview can become a set of subclips, one per answer, which are easier to find and drag in than a single hour long file.

Tidy the timeline and through edits

Tidy the timeline cleans up the structure of an edit. Through edits are cuts where nothing actually changes, the same clip continuing on both sides, often left by a razor click you no longer need. Video by Zaweba marks them with a bow tie on the timeline so you can see them. Edit > Heal through edits joins them back into one clip.

Healing is worth doing before you add effects or keyframes. A clip split by a pointless cut needs everything applied twice, and the two halves can drift apart when you change one and forget the other.

Putting them together

A typical pass on a scene might go: select every clip from one camera and paste the attributes of the graded one. Group a shot with its title. Use match frame to find a longer version of a reaction, and replace a weak take with the better one from the bin. Heal any through edits, then tidy.

None of these tools is complicated. Together, they take a lot of the repetition out of editing in Video by Zaweba, which leaves more time for the decisions that actually matter.