The spatial timeline

The center of the studio window is a full multi-track timeline with the same tracks, lanes, and clips you see in Chapter Studio on the Mac, rebuilt for gaze and pinch.

Same projection as the Mac

Segment tabs run along the top; tap one to switch segments. Below, each track is a group anchored to an asset or audio channel: the asset's own clips in a primary lane, with any effects targeting it (fades, moves, scales, motions) packed into shorter attached lanes directly beneath — never exiled to a distant effects row. Overlapping clips pack into sub-lanes automatically. This is the identical projection Chapter Studio renders, so a tethered session shows the same picture on both devices, updating live in both directions.

Tap the ruler at any point to jump the playhead to the step under your finger, which is handy for stepping through a segment beat by beat.

Retiming clips

Drag a clip's body to retime it. Both its start and end move together, so a five-second video stays five seconds long wherever you slide it. Drag an edge-trim handle at either end to move just that endpoint: pull a reveal earlier, extend a fade, shorten an effect.

Step boundaries are draggable too. Grab the boundary line between two steps and slide it to change the earlier step's duration, and the whole segment's step layout retimes with it.

Retime vs. Trim: two kinds of edge drag

Video clips can mean two different things when you drag an edge, so a selected video clip shows a Retime | Trim mode chip:

Trims are non-destructive: they set an in/out window on the master file, stored in the document. The original video is never touched or re-encoded (see the ChapterScript format).

Snap and zoom

A snap toggle keeps drags honest: with it on, clip and boundary drags snap to nearby step boundaries and to a 1/24-second frame grid, with a cyan guide line showing exactly where you'll land. Toggle it off for freehand placement.

Zoom with the ± buttons or pinch directly on the timeline. Zooming is center-preserving, so the moment under the middle of your view stays put while the scale changes around it, from a whole-segment overview down to frame-level detail.

Keyframes and the graph dock

Any entity with animation gets a keyframe lane in its track: diamonds mark each key at its absolute time. Drag diamonds to retime keys; double-tap deletes one. For full curve work (easing, tangents, per-channel editing), open the graph editor, which docks beneath the timeline and shows the selected entity's channels with the same editor the Mac uses. See the animation overview.

Dropping actions and assets onto tracks

Building a segment is drag-and-drop, straight from the left rail:

1. Drag a chip from the Actions tab (or a row from Assets) and hold it over the timeline. Drag from the plain rows themselves; chips are made to be picked up.

2. Aim at a track at the time you want. Empty sections show dashed dropzones, so even a brand-new project has somewhere to drop.

3. Release. Effect chips insert directly onto their target's track. Scene, video, and audio chips dropped where the target is ambiguous open a quick picker so you choose which entity or channel the action applies to. Asset rows insert a reveal for that entity.

Long-press for more

Long-press any clip for its command menu — duplicating, deleting, jumping to the source step in the inspector, and, for video clips, the destructive Crop to Clip Length… consolidation described in the format page. Long-press is the spatial equivalent of the Mac's right-click.