The timeline
Scrub, zoom, and navigate your take — and understand how Playback keeps your edits safe.
When you stop recording, your take opens in the editor. The timeline runs along the bottom: a ruler, your clip laid out as segments, a waveform of the audio, and lanes for effects like zooms and captions. This is where all editing happens.
Getting around
- Scrub — click or drag anywhere on the timeline body to move the playhead and jump the preview to that moment.
- Zoom the timeline — pinch, ⌥-scroll, or use the −/fit/+ controls to zoom in for fine work or out to see the whole take. Zooming stays centered on the playhead so you don’t lose your place.
- Pan — ⌘-scroll to slide along a zoomed-in timeline. During playback the view follows the playhead automatically.
- Snapping — as you drag edits around, they snap to meaningful points (the playhead, segment edges) with a subtle tick, so things line up cleanly. The playhead pulls a little harder than other targets.
Seeing your frames
Between the ruler and the waveform is the Frames lane — a filmstrip of thumbnails sampled across your take, so you can see what’s on screen at each point in time. It makes lining an effect up against the right frame easy.
Hover over the filmstrip and a magnifier card floats up, showing a crisp, frame-accurate preview of that exact instant plus its timecode — a quick way to find the precise frame you’re after without moving the playhead.
Selecting things to edit
Click a clip segment to select it and edit its properties in the inspector on the right. Click an effect pill — a zoom or a caption — to edit that instead. With nothing selected, the inspector shows your take’s overall style settings. If you ever see “Select a clip on the timeline to edit it,” that’s the inspector waiting for you to pick something.
Undo and redo
Every edit is undoable. Press ⌘Z to undo and ⇧⌘Z to redo — trims, splits, speed changes, zoom edits, all of it. A run of small adjustments (like dragging a slider) collapses into a single undo step, so you don’t have to press ⌘Z twenty times to back out one change.
Your work is always saved
There’s no Save button to remember. Playback autosaves every change about a second after you make it, and flushes anything still pending the moment you quit — so closing the app mid-edit can’t lose your last change. Because editing only ever records instructions (never touches your original recording), your take is always safe and always reversible.