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Preview a reel

The viewer on a reel tab plays the reel as it will export: fitted to the reel's frame, with each clip's scale, fades, cards, overlays and music. What you watch is what you get, to within a frame.

Play and move around

The transport sits beside the playback range slider under the reel timeline: four buttons, Back to the start, Jump to the previous cut, Play / pause the reel and Jump to the next cut, and a readout of the playhead's position. The buttons wait until the preview has loaded.

Key Does
Space Plays or pauses. At the end, plays again from the start of the playback range.
K Pauses.
L Plays forward. Each further tap doubles the speed, up to 8 times, then goes back to normal speed.
Left or Right Steps one frame back or forward.
Shift+Left or Shift+Right Steps ten frames.
Home or End Goes to the start or the end of the playback range.
Alt+Left or Alt+Right Jumps to the previous or next cut. Shift+Alt+Left and Shift+Alt+Right do the same on a reel tab.

There is no J: Shotwork does not play backward. Every key can be changed; see Hotkeys.

With the mouse:

  • Click or drag on the ruler, or the shelf above it, to move the playhead and scrub. This also clears the selection.
  • Drag the playhead's flag, or its time readout, to scrub.
  • Scroll over the reel timeline to step one frame per notch.

Tip

Press Jump to the previous cut twice in a row and it keeps going back: from just after a cut, it goes to the cut before that one.

Loop a section

The playback range slider under the reel timeline does two things at once: it zooms the reel timeline to a section, and playback loops over that section.

  1. Drag the slider's ends in to the section you want, or drag the window along the slider.
  2. Play. Playback loops between the range's start and end.
  3. Drag the ends back out to full width to clear the range.

The fields at either end of the slider show where the range starts and ends. Type a time into one, or middle-drag across it to move it a frame per step. The range is not saved with the reel.

What you see

  • The reel's frame. Every clip is fitted into the reel's frame size the way export pads it, with its Scale applied. See Clip picture.
  • Fades darken the picture, while paused too.
  • Cards play as they will render. While Shotwork prepares one, a bar sweeps along it on the reel timeline.
  • Overlays draw over the shot under the playhead, fade in after each cut, and update as soon as the shot's details change in its shot list.
  • Music plays at each song's level, with its fades. See Music.
  • A clip whose video file has moved plays as black for its length, so the rest of the reel still plays.

When the preview does not play

  • A missing shot, or an image card whose file cannot be read, stops the preview until you remove or replace it.
  • Gaps and cards need ffmpeg to prepare. Without it, the problems list says Can't preview the gap(s) yet: ffmpeg isn't set up. Open a video on a shot-list tab once so Shotwork fetches ffmpeg, then reopen the reel.
Why a preview cut can be a frame off

The reel plays as one virtual video made of its clips in order, with positions in seconds. A position in seconds cannot always land exactly on a frame, so a cut in the preview can sit up to a frame from the real one. Export places every cut by frame, so the exported video and timeline are exact. The preview reloads only when the edit changes, and comes back to where the playhead was.

Full screen

Not built yet

Full-screen playback is not built. Roadmap, reel feature backlog, "Fullscreen playback for presenting".

Choose Full Screen under the viewer to play the reel across the whole screen, for showing it to someone in the room. Press Esc to come back.

Guides

Not built yet

Viewer guides are not built. Roadmap, reel feature backlog, "Safe-area and aspect guides".

Turn on guides to draw the title-safe and action-safe areas over the viewer, and outlines for other shapes such as 9:16 and 1:1, so you can see what a crop for a different delivery would keep. Guides are for you: they never export.