Selecting & Moving Clips

Selecting clips

Click to select

With the Selection tool active (V), click any clip to select it. The clip highlights to indicate selection.

Multi-select

Shift+click additional clips to add them to the selection. Shift+clicking an already-selected clip removes it from the selection.

Marquee select

Click and drag on an empty area of the track canvas to draw a selection rectangle. Any clips that fall within the rectangle become selected when you release.

Select All

Ctrl+A selects all unlocked clips on all unlocked tracks.

Tip

Railcut uses Ctrl (not Command) for all shortcuts on Mac. This is required — Command is intercepted by After Effects before reaching the panel.

Track Select Forward

Press A to activate the Track Select Forward tool. Click a clip and that clip plus all clips to the right on all tracks become selected. Useful for sliding an entire tail of a sequence.

Hold Shift to isolate the selection to a specific track.

Track Select Backward

Shift+A activates the Track Select Backward tool. Click a clip to select it and everything to the left on all tracks.

AE layer sync

When you select a layer in AE’s timeline, Railcut highlights the corresponding clip automatically. This makes it easy to see where an AE layer lives in your Railcut sequence.

Selecting clips in Railcut does not select the corresponding layers in AE.

Moving clips

Drag to move

With the Selection tool active, click and drag any selected clip. All selected clips move together, maintaining their relative timing.

Horizontal drag moves clips forward or backward in time. Clips snap to nearby edit points and the playhead when snap is enabled (Shift+S to toggle).

Vertical drag moves a clip to a different track.

Note

Railcut will overwrite overlapping clips. Dragging a clip on top of another trims or splits the underlying clip to make room. For insert-mode behavior, use Paste Insert.

Nudge clips

With clips selected, nudge them in time with keyboard shortcuts:

• Alt+→ — nudge 1 frame forward
• Alt+← — nudge 1 frame backward
• Alt+Shift+→ — nudge 10 frames forward
• Alt+Shift+← — nudge 10 frames backward

Move Clip Up / Down

With clips selected:

• Alt+↑ — move selected clips up one track
• Alt+↓ — move selected clips down one track

This moves clips vertically with no horizontal position change.

Selecting just video or audio from A/V clips

Clips with both video and audio sources are linked by default. To work with just the video or audio portion:

• Alt+click the video half (upper half of the clip on the video track) to select only the video portion
• Alt+click the audio half (lower half of the clip on the audio track) to select only the audio portion

This is useful when a clip has an empty or unwanted audio track — for example, stock footage that includes a silent audio layer. Selecting just the audio portion and deleting it removes the clutter from your timeline and prevents Railcut from treating that track as a valid audio source during overwrites.

Note

Selecting just one half does not let you move audio and video out of sync. The audio and video portions of a linked clip always stay positionally locked. Selecting independently is for exclusion purposes only — primarily for deleting an unwanted track.

Editing text layer content

Double-click any text layer clip to open a text editing dialog. Type or paste your new text content and apply. Railcut updates the AE text layer.

Copying and pasting

Copy

Select one or more clips and press Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard.

Cut

Ctrl+X copies the clips and removes them from the timeline, leaving a gap.

Paste

Ctrl+V pastes the clipboard clips starting at the current playhead position. The clips land on the same track type they were copied from. Relative timing of multiple clips is preserved on paste.

Paste Insert

Ctrl+Shift+V inserts copied clips at the playhead with ripple. Existing clips shift right to make room. See Paste Insert for details.

Right-click clip menu

Right-clicking a clip (or a selection of clips) opens a context menu with additional operations.

Label color

A row of color swatches at the top of the context menu sets the label color. This matches AE’s label system. Changes apply to all selected clips at once.

Select Label Group

Select Label Group selects all clips on the timeline that share the same label color as the right-clicked clip. Useful for quickly grabbing all clips of a given type.

Fit to Frame

Fit to Frame scales the clip so it fills the entire comp frame (100% scale, centered, no cropping). Only applies to video layers. Useful for quickly fitting footage that arrived at a non-standard size.

Disable / Enable

Disable turns off the clip’s visibility and audio without removing it from the timeline. The clip appears dimmed. Enable restores it. This maps directly to AE’s layer enable/disable toggle (the eyeball for video, or layer enable for audio).

Lock / Unlock

Lock locks the individual clip against editing — it can’t be moved, trimmed, or overwritten by other clips landing on its track. Locked clips show a lock indicator. Unlock releases them.

This is different from track locking (in the track header), which locks the entire track.

Rename

Rename opens a text field to give the clip a new name. This renames the underlying AE layer.

Speed / Duration

Opens the Speed/Duration dialog for adjusting playback speed. See Rate Stretch for details.

Deselecting

Click on any empty area of the track canvas to deselect all clips.