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Video tutorial: "Understand adaptive timeline"
Selecting a sequence or a time in the movie is pivotal to most of SimpleMovieX actions.
You'll have to become proficient at it, and luckily it's rather intuitive.
The Quick Ref
You can find all this information condensed in the Quick Ref pane of the Tools drawer.
Knobs
There is always three knobs in the timeline, one blue (active) and two dimmed (inactive).
The playhead is always the blue knob, so if you move it, the frame displayed in the movie changes.
When the movie plays, the blue knob moves accordingly.
Selection
The selection is the sequence between the 2 triangular knobs. Whether the playhead is at the beginning, at the end or elsewhere doesn't matter:
The selection is represented by a rose strip between those 2 knobs.
Note that the playhead position (blue knob) is displayed in the blue box: 4 seconds 73 hundreds. The selection duration is displayed next to the Scissors button: 1 second 77 hundreds
Guess what ? It's the amount of movie that you would remove by using the Scissors!
Move the knobs
Either with the mouse, or with left and right arrow keys.
Switch between triangular knobs with TAB key or just clicking on them.
Extend selection to full movie with Edit>Select All (Command-A).
See Quick Ref for the rest of useful keyboard shortcuts0.
Zoom-in, Zoom-out
When the movie is very long, say 2 hours, and you want to work accurately at second or sub-second level, you need to zoom the timeline.
With up and down arrows, you can adjust the zoom factor to make things usable again. In the picture, the exact same situation at 2 different scales.
Note that the magnification [10x] is displayed and the selection is also represented as a blue strip in the "birds eye" view just above the zoomed timeline. The red arrows on the sides scroll the playhead by one screen to the left or to the right.
The gray braces show what the visible timeline segment represent on the whole movie duration.
The orange knob in the first picture is the "snap back" that indicates where the last playback has started. You can return there by pressing Delete key.
The White Disk or why can't I stop exactly on this particular frame ?
You may have noticed the white disk. Depending on the format of the movie, you may also feel frustrated by SimpleMovieX rounding the playhead position a few frames away from your choice or not letting you step frame by frame through the movie. The culprit is the white disk, also called Keyframe Indicator, and you should actually thank him for that.
Some video formats can only cut with guarantee on some particular frames, called Keyframes, and SimpleMovieX enforces a keyframe-only policy to avoid you bad surprises. You can always override Keyframe rounding by unchecking the button inside the disk, this is called Non-sticky mode. But in this case the result you get after saving will be somewhat unpredictable (except if you save in QuickTime format or export to another format, in both cases there will be no surprise).
Go to Edit Movies or learn Advanced Timeline features