The Studio workspace

Chapter Studio borrows the layout every film editor already knows, a source monitor and a program monitor over a timeline, and applies it to spatial authoring. This page is the tour: what each region does and how to move around the 3D viewer.

The Welcome window

Chapter Studio opens to a Welcome window: New Project, Open Project…, and your most recent chapters, each with its segment count and when you last touched it. Click a recent to open it. A project you've moved or deleted says so plainly and offers to remove itself from the list, and every recent's context menu has Open, Show in Finder, and Remove from Recents.

You can return to it any time from the Help menu, and if you'd rather skip it, Settings ▸ General ▸ Reopen the last chapter takes you straight into your work at launch.

Five regions

The editor is one window with five regions. Each keeps a visible title, can be hidden and restored without losing its state, and remembers its size as an app preference, never inside your project file.

The toolbar carries one toggle per hideable region, plus Add, Import and Save, and the Live control for a connected Vision Pro.

The inspector follows you, or doesn't

A picker in the inspector header sets its tracking mode. Selection, the default, follows whatever you click, showing the active segment when nothing is selected. Segment pins it to the segment's settings even while you select clips and entities, which is the mode you want while tuning a backdrop or presentation mode. Media Info appears when you're browsing a file and shows its technical details.

Tools

One tool is active at a time, and the buttons live with the surface they drive: the viewer's header holds Select V, Move W, Rotate E and Scale R; the timeline's header holds Blade B, Hand H and Zoom Z. A one-line hint in the viewer always says what the active tool does.

Moving the camera

Camera navigation is modeless: it works under every tool and never changes your document.

The pivot control in the viewer's corner decides what a drag orbits. Viewer Origin, the default, orbits the point your eventual audience faces. Selection orbits whatever you have selected. Look Around pans and tilts from a fixed eye point like a tripod head; park the camera at the origin with Home View first and you are looking around from exactly where the wearer's head will be, which is the honest way to judge an immersive composition.

Home View ⌃H is a button right in the viewer for when you're lost. Frame Selection F and Frame Scene ⌘⇧F fly to what matters. The axis indicator in the top corner (X red, Y green, Z blue) is also a control: click it for standard views, Front through Isometric. Front is the pose your audience has.

Immersive guides

The Overlays menu draws the things a flat monitor can't tell you about a scene someone will stand inside, each guide individually switchable: a floor grid, an eye-level grid, distance rings, the comfort zone, the field of view, the 180° boundary, and a forward-axis marker, with optional labels. A viewer-height preset (Seated 1.20 m, Average 1.50 m, Tall 1.75 m) moves eye level to match your audience.

Other overlays include the grid and world axes (on by default), wireframe, selection bounds, motion trails, a backdrop preview, and a frame-rate readout for diagnosing a heavy scene (off by default; leave it off when you're not using it).

Snapping, in 3D and in time

Two independent snap systems. Transform Snap quantizes viewer edits, with configurable position, rotation and scale steps. Timeline snapping N magnetizes clip edges to steps, other clips and the playhead; its control reads Snap or Free in words, and holding ⌘ bypasses it for a single drag. See editing clips.

Editor volume

A speaker button and slider in the viewer's transport bar are the editor's master volume: one gain and one mute covering video previews, scheduled audio and the backdrop's soundtrack together. It's editor-only state, so turning your Mac's preview down never changes what the chapter plays on a headset. See audio channels.

Shortcuts worth memorizing

From here, the natural next stops are the timeline overview and your first chapter.