Final Cut Pro blade tool cuts before playhead, playhead also red

A screenshot might be elucidating.

There’s the playhead and there’s the skimmer (if activated). The skimmer takes precedence, so if you have both and press Command-B to blade, it will blade at the skimmer, not the playhead position.

You can turn the skimmer on or off by pressing the letter s

Thank you for the screenshot, it does explain everything!

Your timeline is zoomed in very far, so much so that the grey area I marked with two arrows is ONE FRAME, one single image.

So is each space between consecutive "ticks" at the top of the timeline.

You can't cut video mid-frame. Your playhead is parked in the middle of the frame, so FCP is blading before said frame. It is all working correctly.

It is cutting on the frame properly. Your playhead is in-between frames. Unfortunately, FCP allows you to drag your playhead to audio samples rather than lock it to frames, which I find really annoying. We should be able to turn off the audio sample level and lock into video frame boundaries, IMHO.

The left/right arrow keys will move you from frame to frame. So with your playhead where it is, hit either left or right arrow keys, you'll see where the frames actually are.

I did a short clip to illustrate this.

https://youtu.be/8DeUbue4ghU

It IS frame accurate, and that is all that it can be in regards to video. You are confusing "frame accurate" to what I'd call "pixel accurate". But whenever a frame is more than one pixel wide in the timeline, this is going to happen.

You simply can't cut at half a frame, or one third of a frame.

Perhaps you'd prefer the playhead to only move in whole frame increments, ie. from here (frame 0)

to here (frame 1)

Whenever the playhead is at an exact frame boundary, the cut will appear exactly where the playhead is.

Now in the next image, the playhead is somewhere in the middle of frame 1 - but the current frame is STILL frame 1. You cannot blade a 1.3 frames. It will blade at the start of frame 1.

And being 25fps or 30fps just change how many frames there are in a second. In 25fps each frame lasts for 1/25s; in other words, you can only blade at increments of 1/25s. There is no video in 25fps with a duration of 1/100s, for example; or 21.01s, for that matter, because a video has be an integer number of frames.

Ben explained very well, I think. FCP lets you move the playhead in subframe increments, but video exists only in frames.

For example, you may have 30 frames per second. If the playhead is at frame 23 of those 30 frames, it doesn't matter if it is near the beginning or near the end of the thumbnail, it is always on the same frame. Imagine, if you will, a traditional film and an actual physical blade. You don't want (and in the digital case you can't) cut half a frame. You would only cut in the red lines (image courtesy of grok; red dashed lines by me...)

I am looking very closely at your posted screenshots, Rachel, and your playhead is NOT on a frame boundary, which is what we're trying to tell you.

@Rachel4444, can you post a youtube video showing what you're doing? I'm suspicious of static images where mouse and cursor position are crucially important but might not be accurate when the image is actually captured.

In 30p video, you have 30 frames per second of video, but 48,000 sample of audio.

And I'd suggest you're zooming in to your video more than you used to.