Appearance
Layout Designer
The Layout Designer is an inline canvas overlay for visually positioning the clips of your compositions directly on top of the preview picture. Instead of typing numbers into the Inspector, you drag, resize and align items by eye, with their actual screen as the backdrop.
It is available in the Preview window (Main Editor) — toggled with the Layout Designer button in the preview's header.
Opening the Designer
- Open the Preview with the monitor button in the header toolbar (Toggle Preview (Composition / Output)) and pick the screen in its screen selector.
- Click the Layout Designer button in the preview's header. The button turns blue when active.
- Outline boxes appear over every positionable clip of the selected screen that is active at the timeline locator, each labelled with its name. With none, the canvas reads No positionable clips on this screen at the locator.
A clip belongs to a screen through its Plays on: the clip's own, else its track's, else its composition's. The designer shows only clips that play on the screen picked in the Preview (or on one of its fields), which are the clips the engine draws there. A clip without a field is on no screen and is not shown. Pick another screen in the Preview's screen selector to arrange its clips.
When the designer is open, the preview's zoom and pan still work, and the outline boxes stay locked to the underlying image.
The Toolbar
The toolbar appears above the canvas whenever the designer is open, headed Layout Designer.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
3 items at locator | How many clips the canvas shows: the ones active at the timeline locator. |
1920×1080 (dims badge) | Pixel size of the screen the preview shows. |
| 🔓 / 🔒 | Aspect-ratio lock. When locked, resizing keeps the original W:H ratio. Hold Shift while resizing to temporarily override the lock. |
| PX / % | Unit of the numeric fields X / Y / W / H: pixels, or percent of the screen. The rotation R° is always in degrees. |
| Free / Snap | Free moves items anywhere; with Snap, dragged item edges snap to each other's edges, like clip snapping on the Timeline. |
| X / Y / W / H / R° | A second row, shown while an item is selected: its name, position, size and rotation. Type a value and press Enter (or leave the field) to apply it. With several items selected, the fields show and change the first one. |
Selecting Items
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Select one item | Click its box on the canvas. |
| Add / remove from selection | Shift-click or Ctrl-click (⌘ on macOS) an item. |
| Clear selection | Click empty canvas space (without a modifier key). |
The currently-selected item also becomes the focus of the Inspector — selecting on the canvas opens the Inspector for that item and vice versa.
Moving and Resizing
| Gesture | Result |
|---|---|
| Drag any selected box | Moves all selected items together. |
| Drag the bottom-right grip (single selection only) | Resizes the item. Hold Shift to bypass the aspect-ratio lock for a free resize. |
| Arrow keys | Nudge the selection by 1 px per press. Hold Shift for 10 px steps. |
The boxes are drawn with each clip's rotation. There is no rotation handle: type the angle into R° in the toolbar, or in the clip's Inspector.
Multi-selection moves keep relative spacing
When several items are selected, dragging or nudging moves all of them by the same offset, so their relative layout is preserved. Resize is intentionally limited to single-item selection.
Only the Clips at the Locator
The canvas shows the clips that are active at the current timeline locator — move the locator to arrange the clips of another moment. A selected clip the locator leaves is deselected, so a nudge or a typed value never moves a clip you cannot see.
Tips
- Keyboard nudging works best with the canvas focused. Click anywhere inside the canvas before using arrow keys.
- Aspect lock + Shift is the fastest way to scale an item proportionally most of the time, then break ratio for a single resize.
- The dotted border that appears when you zoom the preview below 100 % is the screen boundary — anything outside that border will be cropped on the real output.
- The designer never changes timing or content — only geometry. To re-time a clip, use the Timeline; to swap media, use the File Browser.
Related Pages
- Output Preview — the Preview window, where the designer button lives in the Main Editor
- Inspector Panel — numeric, property-level editing of the same fields
- Timeline — re-time clips that you have positioned with the designer