Top and Tail Editing

Top and tail editing is a simple way to refine your edits quickly. This tutorial will show you how and when to use top and tail editing in Adobe Premiere Pro for editing recipe videos.

Today’s tip is a quick one, but I’m guessing you might not know about it, and I think once you do you’ll find yourself using it a lot in your editing.

What is Top and Tail Editing?

Top and tail editing refers to cutting off either the beginning or the end of your clip. We’ll do this with the Q and W keys on our keyboard, but if you’d prefer to set them to something completely custom to you, head over to my post on how to create custom keyboard shortcuts.

When to Use Top and Tail Editing

I find this most useful after I’ve created a rough cut of my footage and am trying to trim it down to a specific size, or just need to make adjustments to where I’ve placed my cut.

You can either use this on the fly, meaning as you watch through your footage, or by going in and choosing frame by frame where you’d like to make your edit.

How to Use Top and Tail Editing

Let’s say I want to trim a few frames off the beginning of a clip. I’ll just place my playhead there and press Q. Those beginning frames will disappear, and all my other clips will fall in line (ripple delete) without needing to move them back into place. I can do the same thing to the end of a clip by pressing W.

I like to use the J, K, and L keys to scrub through my footage and the arrow keys to help navigate by frame or by clip. If you’d like more information on how to use quick keys to speed up your editing you can head over to my post about how to use quick keys or sign up for my mailing list to get my quick key cheat sheet.

This is such a quick and useful tip that I think will help you speed up your editing. Let me know if you have any questions, or head over to the Facebook Group to start a conversation there.