A method of defining a media editing application for creating media presentations. The method provides a composite display area for displaying a set of clip shapes that represent media clips. It also provides a consolidated editing tool for (1) identifying clip-shape edit points that are near a cursor's location as the cursor moves from track to track in the composite display area and (2) collectively selecting the identified clip-shape edit points along multiple track in order to receive an edit operation to collectively perform on said the clip-shapes of the identified edit points.