This week on MacBreak Studio, I show Steve Martin from Ripple Training a different and perhaps better way to create handles for your compound clips.

Back in this earlier episode, affectionally named the Compound Clip Conundrum, Steve showed us how compound clips, once created, don’t have any handle material, even though the clips inside them at the ends may have plenty. The result of this rather unfortunate behavior is that you can’t slip a compound clip or extend the head or the tail. The workaround Steve demonstrated involved going inside the compound clip and manually adding handles to the head and tail. Doing so affects the duration of the compound clip (only at the head, mind you), so once completed you need to trim the compound clip back to the original length.

Thanks to Alex Gollner, there is a better way. However, it involves making a few adjustments before you create the compound clip, so you need to think ahead. You can do it after the fact of course, but if you follow these steps before creating the compound clip, I think you’ll find the process fast and easy.

This new approach involves simply adding transitions to the first and last clips that you want included in the compound clip. Your final handles will be half the duration of the transition, so set the transition duration based on the handle amount you think you’ll need. For example, a 1-second transition will give you 1/2 second handles.

Once you’ve added the transitions (I recommend the keyboard shortcut Command-T for doing so), you create the compound clip but make sure to NOT select the transitions – just all the clips between them. Afterwards, simply delete the transitions as their job is done: they have create handles inside the compound clip! Open it up and see for yourself, or just try slipping or trimming it.

If you like this type of information, check out our Warp Speed Editing tutorial, which is chock-full of tasty bits like this one.