Building a reel

A reel is a .swreel document: clips arranged on a timeline, with music, overlay templates and title cards. It draws on every shot list you have marked, so building one is choosing and ordering rather than hunting.

The reel tab's six regions, numbered as the table below lists them

#	Region	What it holds
1	Shots and Features tabs	Switches the left panel between the shots you can add and the features you can drag on.
2	Shot picker	Every shot in your library, filtered by the same query language the shot list uses.
3	Viewer	The reel playing, overlays and all, at export framing.
4	Reel settings	The selected clip's own settings above, the whole reel's below, and the export controls at the bottom.
5	Reel timeline	The template band on top, the clips in the middle, the music lane underneath.
6	Transport	Play, step, jump, and the reel's own length readout.

A reel tab and a shot-list tab are different documents, and both can be open at once. See The window for the shot-list side.

Where to start

1. Start a reel, empty or filled from your ratings.
2. Add shots from the picker.
3. Arrange clips: order, trim, roll, slide, replace.
4. Holds and shortening, which is where a reel stops being a list and starts being an edit.

Then the things that make it a reel rather than a sequence: music, fades, overlay templates, cards, and a length budget.