Suppose you need to edit one or more clips in a sequence, but need to keep the overall duration of the clips constant. Don’t worry! The Slip Edit and Slide Edit tools in Adobe® Premiere® Pro allow you to make the changes you need without affecting the sequence’s durations. 

When you have three clips side by side in the timeline, you can perform specialized editing techniques called slip edits and slide edits. Slip and slide edits could be described as ways to adjust two edit points simultaneously, but they’re much easier to understand visually, by watching them in action in the Timeline window. This may explain why these edits can be accomplished only in the Timeline window and not in the Trim window.

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In a slip edit, you change both the In point and the Out point of a clip at the same time without altering the adjacent clips. It’s as if you’re viewing part of the clip through a space between the two other clips; when you slip the center clip back and forth, you get to see a different part (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Notice how the frames of the center clip look before a slip edit. This figure uses numbers to represent image frames and better illustrate the effect.

Figure 2: Dragging the center clip with the Slip Edit tool changes its In and Out points simultaneously, maintaining its duration.

In a slide edit, the clip’s In and Out points remain the same as you shift the clip in the timeline. When you drag, or slide, the clip to the left, the preceding clip gets shorter, and the following clip gets longer. When you slide the clip to the right, the preceding clip gets longer, and the following clip gets shorter (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A slide edit retains the In and Out points of the center clip while changing the In point of the preceding clip and the In Point of the following clip.