[Novice Guide] How to Cut Clips in After Effects?

When you ask someone engaged in video processing about how to edit and cut videos, they may recommend you to use Adobe After Effects, which provides professional video editing functions. Well, it is undeniable that After Effects' video editing functions are really powerful. However, there is a premise, you are also required to master skilled operations, which makes many novices and beginners go no further. Due to this, you need to learn details to cut clips in After Effects. With this graphic tutorial below, you’ll clearly grasp how to cut in After Effects.

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Before starting, make sure the Render or Adobe Media Encoder of your After Effects is available. If not, please download and initialize them.

Create a New Project. Head to upper-left menu > File > New > New Project. Import footage into AE. Menu > File > Import (In the middle of the dropdown list) > File... You can also choose multiple files to import several files once.

Drag and drop the imported file to the middle window, which is marked with New Composition, so as to create composition for the video you want to cut. Since you do this, a new control window will pop up under the composition window.

In the control window, find the Current Time Indicator that looks like a line in the Time Ruler. Slide it to the frame where you want to start cropping video. Then press Ctrl + Shirt + D to split a new layer for it. Next, slide the indicator to the end frame and press Ctrl + Shirt + D again to set the end time of the clip.

To be precise, what you just did is preparation work. Now, you should determine the work area by moving the Work Area Start and Work Area End sliders. You can find them on the top progress bar, they are usually blue or yellow. After that, right-click the top progress bar and click Trim Comp to Work Area. Now the video clip is cut.

Lastly, navigate to File > Export > Adobe Media Encoder Queue. I choose another option, i.e. Add to Render Queue, because I have not installed the media encoder. Then, you can see a new window in the same location as the control window. If this is your first time to export files in After Effect in this way, you may be required to nominate the output path and the file name. You can finish it by clicking the inverted triangle button next to Output to: Now, on the upper-right corner, click Render to finish the tutorial on how to cut in after effects.

To be honest, it's still a bit difficult to cut video clips with AE. For those who do not want to spend much energy on learning how to cut in After Effects, WonderFox HD Video Converter Factory Pro assists you to process this work within simple mouse-clicks. Now, let us find out what you actually need to click. It is the most effective way to check over something by your firsthand experience.