Storyboarding and the Story Reel - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 53

Figures 4.53 Using Extend from Frame causes all handles and strips on the mouse side of the current frame marker to transform together

So if you have used the A key to select all of the strips in the sequencer and moved them so that the begin-
ning of a particular strip matches a sound cue, you now have an easy way of making that strip shrink or grow
so that the next strip begins at the next sound cue. With all of the strips selected (this is why we locked the
sound strip earlier—to prevent it from being affected when we did this), position the current frame marker
with the left mouse button in the middle of the strip whose position you are sure of. If you need to move
the right side of the strip, put your mouse to the right of the current frame marker; if you need to move the
left handle of the strip, position the cursor to the left. Press the E key and move the mouse back and forth to
see how the transform functions. All other strips on the side of the cursor that are adjacent to the central strip
will move along with it, allowing you to grow and shrink the central strip without introducing gaps or caus-
ing overlap.

The great advantage to using this method of adjusting the image strips over simply grabbing the handles indi-
vidually and pulling them around is that you never have to worry about gaps or overlaps occurring between
images. Everything stays neatly together. Although the description of the functionality is complex, after using
it a few times, its value will become apparent.

However, if you do need to break things up and start really shuffl ing strips around, here are some tools that
can make your life easier:

● Ctrl or Alt right mouse button : Using either Ctrl or Alt (not both at once), while right mouse button select-
ing a strip selects both the strip and one that immediately borders it. If you use Ctrl, it selects the one on
the left. Alt selects the one on the right. In addition, the two handles on the border between the strips are
directly selected. This is useful for adjusting the boundary frame between the two strips without moving
their outer limits (Figure 4.54). This selection method adds to any existing selections, so you may want to
use the A key to make sure that nothing else is selected fi rst.
● Ctrl or Alt right mouse button

2: Adding a second click to the previous command will select all strips to
the right or left of the directly selected one. This allows you to quickly and easily select and move entire
blocks of strips at once, say, to make room for an additional strip.