Drag and Drop Clip Position Preview Help

Hello!
So what I often want to do is to place a clip directly at cursor on the timeline. This is helpful when syncing a sound effect or text or whatever to a certain moment in the video. However when I try to drag and drop to the timeline I have no idea where its actually going to place it. I know approximately, but theirs no way of knowing as far as I can tell.

I think it might be a software issue. Ive been watching tutorials, and when they drag and drop to the timeline there’s a sort of preview (A pale box) of the clip that shows up on the timeline that they can then position to make it line up exactly where they want.

Watch this https://youtu.be/aP507BqKV1U video and skip to 1:27. Watch as he drags it to timeline and how you can see a whitish box that moves with the mouse on the timeline.

I don’t have that. Is this a setting that I need to enable, a glitch, or am I just messing something up?

I just tried draging and droping a color (file, open other, color) and I got the pale box, but it doesn’t show up when I drag and drop clips or sound files or images.

Any help would be appreciated.

I’m getting the white box with video clips and still images with 18.03.06; what OS and version of Shotcut are you running?

In the meantime, a workaround: create a video track for “dumping” new clips, then switch them to the track you actually want them in by dragging or copy-paste.

I am using 18.03.06 on my laptop that is running windows 10.
Here is what it looks like when I try to drag and drop things https://youtu.be/S8m8DmQpwZA

Ahah! I think I figured it out, so it works when I drag and drop from the viewing window thingy (the place where the clip plays) but not from the playlist. Is that normal?

Yes that’s the way it works here as well.

Strange. Why did they make it so that it only works from the player and not the playlist? Seems counterintuitve to me.

Dragging from source viewer or playlist to the timeline always seems to work for me in W10 Pro 64bit.
Or am I missing something?

Actually I think it’s easier to open the clip in the source viewer press c for copy, v to insert the clip in the timeline, moving following clips to the right, or b to overwrite. I think it’s more precise.

Also the drag and drop sometimes fails in Shotcut and you have to restart the application for it to come back.

Dragging from source viewer or playlist works for me as well. The OP was wondering why a white box appears on the timeline when a clip is dropped from the source viewer.

39 PM

There is no white box when a clip is dropped from the playlist.

Because the white area represents the value and length in time of the clip you’re dragging from the source viewer as you may have marked IN and OUT points before dragging. From the playlist the entire clip is being inserted.

1 Like

That makes perfect sense.

I never knew this. The in/out points is a game changer for me. I never used the playlist for anything, as I just usually drag video/audio files on top of the play window, then to the timeline, same with still images.

Yes, you can just mark the section of the clip you want to insert. Useful at times.