PreSonus Blog

Basic Video Editing in Studio One

Studio One 6’s enhanced video track now includes basic editing. Yes! You can cut out the section of your band’s live video where the drunk guy came up and started singing along. Instead, just go directly to the part after the drunk was kicked out, and you re-started the song from the beginning.

You’ve likely heard the expression about something being “left on the cutting room floor.” Cutting out sections quickly and precisely is a crucial part of video editing. This requires being able to “jog” the cursor to locate the exact spot you want to split the video, down to individual frames (or even milliseconds). After the cursor is in place, then you can type Alt+X/Opt+X to split at the cursor.

For example, suppose I want to cut the section outlined in white in fig. 1. This is from a video I did on how to create a Pro Tools-like Multi-Mono plug-in mode in Studio One.

Figure 1: The section outlined in white needs to be cut.

Choose the jog calibration you want to use. For precise cursor positioning, use frames or seconds (fig. 2).

Figure 2: The jog calibration is being changed from Seconds to Frames.

If you chose frames, click in the transport’s frames field. Now, every mouse scroll click will jog the cursor forward or backward by one frame. In fig. 3, the cursor has been positioned exactly as desired. After being positioned, select the audio and video events that include the section to be split. Alt+X/Opt+X splits the audio and video events at the cursor position.

Of course, you don’t have to edit with single-frame resolution. For less critical edits, you can just place the cursor at the approximate position, and split.

Figure 3: The start of the section to be cut has a split.

Note: In a real-world situation, you’d have the video window open to confirm that the video is in the right location, and you’d probably zoom much closer in to make sure the cursor is at the exact split point. However, I wanted the screenshots to accommodate those reading this blog post on a smartphone 😊

Split at the end of the section you want to cut, and then select the video and audio sections to be cut (fig. 4).

Figure 4: Almost there—we’ve defined the section to be cut.

Select Ripple editing (fig. 5). Ripple editing moves the video after the removed section earlier on the timeline, so it starts where the removed section started. This closes up the “hole” left by a cut section.

Figure 5: Ripple editing is a common editing technique for video.

Delete the section you wanted to remove, and now the video closes up so that there’s no gap (fig. 6).

Figure 6: Success! The section of the video outlined in fig. 1 is gone.

A Couple Other Tips

  • Splits must be separated by at least one second. So, don’t expect to use splits to edit out a single cough or breath inhale. That needs to be done in a video editor, prior to working on the audio in Studio One.
  • You can link or unlink audio track editing from the video (fig. 7). In this example, we wanted them linked. But suppose you did some time-stretching to the audio track. You might want to split it at a different place than where you would split the video.
Figure 7: You can choose whether editing the audio track is linked to the video.

To move around the video, click and drag on the mini-timeline in the video window (fig. 8).

Figure 8: The mini-timeline allows navigating rapidly around a video.