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Set a length budget

Reels are submitted to a length. A budget turns that into something visible while you edit rather than a number you check at the end.

Steps

  1. Turn on Limit to in the reel's settings.
  2. Set the length in seconds.

A line appears on the timeline at that point. Clips past it are over budget and read as such.

A clip edge dragged out to the budget line, which catches it, with the live length in the drag tooltip

What happens

The budget is a guide, not a limit: nothing stops you going over, and export does not refuse. What it does is give edges something to snap to, so trimming a reel to exactly 30 seconds is a drag rather than arithmetic.

The summary under the settings tells you the shot count, the current length, the frame rate and the budget together.

Timeline length above it is a different thing: how much time the timeline displays, so you can zoom out past the end of the reel while arranging.

Tip

Turn on Show frame count instead of timecode if you think in frames. It changes every readout on the tab, not just this one.