Navigate and Zoom the Timeline
How to move the playhead, zoom in and out, scroll around, and use the mini-timeline to get anywhere in your project fast.
Move the playhead
Click anywhere in the timeline ruler and the playhead jumps there. Hold the mouse button down and drag to scrub. The Preview updates frame by frame as you move, and you hear short bursts of audio at each position, which makes it easy to find a word or a beat by ear.
You can also grab the playhead's triangle handle directly. The cursor becomes an open hand when you hover it and a closed hand while you drag.
Starting a drag in the ruler during playback stops playback, and it stays stopped when you let go. This matches how scrubbing works in other editors.
For single-frame moves and jumps to the start or end, use the arrow keys, Home, and End. See Playback Controls.
Zoom the timeline
The timeline zoom controls live at the right end of the status bar:
- The fit button, tooltip Fit timeline in window (Shift+Z), zooms out until the whole timeline fits in the window with a small margin, then scrolls back to the start. Pressing Shift+Z does the same thing.
- The − and + buttons zoom out and in one step at a time.
- The slider between them sweeps the whole zoom range.
You can also hold Ctrl and roll the mouse wheel over the timeline. This zooms around your cursor, so the moment under the pointer stays put while everything else stretches or shrinks. It's the fastest way to dive into a specific cut.
Pan left and right
The timeline has no horizontal scrollbar. To pan sideways:
- Hold Shift and roll the mouse wheel anywhere over the timeline.
- Roll the plain wheel with the cursor over the ruler or over the splitter band between the video and audio tracks.
- Use the mini-timeline, covered below.
Scroll video and audio tracks separately
The timeline is split into a video section on top and an audio section below, and each keeps its own scroll position. The plain mouse wheel scrolls whichever section your cursor is over. Video tracks stack upward from the splitter and audio tracks stack downward, so scrolling reveals the higher-numbered tracks in each section.
When a section holds more tracks than fit on screen, a thin scrollbar appears at its right edge and hides again when it isn't needed. Drag the scrollbar's thumb to scroll, or click the empty space above or below the thumb to jump one screenful.
Resize the two sections
A horizontal splitter band separates the video and audio sections. Hover it and the divider line turns blue with an up-down resize cursor. Drag it to give more room to either section. Press Escape during the drag to cancel and restore the old position. Neither section can be squeezed below a minimum height, so you can't lose one entirely.
Get around with the mini-timeline
The strip above the tracks shows your whole project at a glance: one thin row per track with labels like V1 and A1 on the left, colored blocks for clips, a time ruler, a playhead line, and a rectangle marking the slice of the project the main timeline is currently showing.
- Click anywhere in the strip to center the main timeline on that spot.
- Drag inside the rectangle to pan the main timeline.
- Drag either edge of the rectangle to zoom. Making the box narrower zooms in, making it wider zooms out, and the opposite edge stays pinned.
- Click the toggle at the strip's top-left, tooltip Collapse mini-timeline, to shrink the strip to a single row labeled All. Click it again (Expand mini-timeline) to bring the track rows back.
Clicking the mini-timeline moves your view, not the playhead. To move the playhead, click in the main timeline's ruler.
To pin down moments you want to come back to, add Markers.