Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of video clips in the timeline in the Cut page in DaVinci Resolve. You’ve also got some audio clips in the audio track. If you were to click on a video clip in the timeline and press the delete key on your keyboard to delete the clip, you’d find that the clip disappears, but an empty space remains. The timeline doesn’t move. Why is that? If Ripple On is set, shouldn’t the clip disappear and the timeline adjust (shrink) accordingly?
I’ll start at the beginning. Take a look at a small demo project I’ve got set up for this tutorial. These are the timelines:
As you can see, there are video clips and an audio clip in the timeline. Take a look at something else. If I click the Ripple On/Off button so Ripple is on (All the way to the left of the timeline), when I delete a video clip from the timeline, the remaining clips should ripple and take the space of the deleted clip. If you aren’t aware, ripple means that if something is deleted from the timeline, the space that was occupied by that thing will be filled with the remaining things. Basically, the timeline will reduce in length.
Why Doesn’t Ripple Delete Work?
If you have only video clips in a single timeline in Resolve and you have Ripple set to on and you delete one of those clips, yes, ripple delete should work just fine. When the clip is removed from the timeline, the others will take its place. This will all occur with just one push of the delete key on your keyboard. So simply click to highlight the clip in the timeline and press delete. Problem solved.
The issue arises when you’ve got additional assets in the timeline, such as an audio clip. In cases like these, selecting and deleting a video clip will remove the clip just fine, but that part of the timeline won’t ripple right away. Why not? It’s actually intended to be this way. Because there are multiple assets in the timeline, ripple deleting doesn’t always work. DaVinci Resolve doesn’t quite know what you’d like to ripple. To work around this, you’ll need to hard delete the clip. Next up, I’ll show you how to do this.
How to Delete a Video Clip From the Timeline
It’s easy to delete a clip from the timeline. All you need to do is select the clip you’d like to delete with your mouse and then press the Delete key on your keyboard. Once you do this, the clip will be gone. The timeline won’t ripple, but the clip will be gone. Take a look at the below graphic. I just removed the middle video clip.
See? The clip is gone. The only problem now is there’s an empty space where the clip used to be. How do we make the timeline ripple? Simply click the grey space to select it and press delete again. I’ll now click to select the empty space.
And now I’ll press the Delete key on my keyboard to remove the empty space and ripple delete the empty space in the timeline.
The important lesson here is that ripple delete doesn’t always work the way you might expect it to in DaVinci Resolve. Sometime, depending on what you’ve got going on in the timeline, you’ll need to do a regular delete and then delete the gap left behind. It’s normal and intended to work this way.
Remember:
Deleting an element will simply delete it, leaving the space it was occupying in the timeline.
Ripple deleting will delete the element and also the gap it leaves behind in the timeline.
If you have any questions regarding why ripple delete doesn’t always work in DaVinci Resolve or how to fully delete an asset and the empty gap it leaves behind in the timeline, Please ask in the comment section down below. Thanks!
If you’d like to learn more, click through for all of my free DaVinci Resolve Tutorials.
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