Trimming audio and video separately with a split edit (also known as making a J or L cut)

You've seen and heard it a million times in movies and television shows before, but if done just right, you've never noticed it. It's the invisible form of editing known as a split edit. Often used during transitions from one scene to another or during conversation scenes, you will hear the next scene arrive before you see it. The audio of the second scene arrives a couple of seconds before we see the first shot of the scene. This type of split edit is nicknamed a J cut and it is named so for the shape of clips it creates in the timeline (you'll see it in a bit). The flipped version of a split edit is the L cut , in which you see the video cuts before the audio.

Getting ready

In this exercise, we've plopped two clips into our timeline that both have handles at the edit point. We'll need these handles in order to alter our clips' video or audio edit points. The first clip is a speaker talking about deer...