The canvas and the timeline
A film project has two workspaces, and you switch between them at the top of the editor: Storyboard and Montage.
Storyboard is the canvas
Section titled “Storyboard is the canvas”Storyboard is an endless plane holding cards. A card can be a video, an image, an audio file, music, a text block or a sticky note. Cards sit wherever you put them, at whatever zoom you like.
Nothing on the canvas is in a sequence. There is no order, no start time, no duration. It is where you gather references, park generated shots, write down what a scene needs, and see the whole project at once.
Region boards group cards into scenes. A board is a named rectangle you draw on the canvas. Membership is spatial: a card belongs to every board whose rectangle contains the card’s center. Moving a card into a board is all it takes to add it to that scene, and moving it out removes it.
Montage is the timeline
Section titled “Montage is the timeline”Montage is the sequence. Tracks, clips laid out in time, transitions at the junctions between clips, and per-clip modifiers such as color, speed and chroma key.
The timeline is what export reads. Nothing else is.
The mistake to avoid
Section titled “The mistake to avoid”Generating a shot, or importing a file, puts it on the canvas or in your library. It does not put it in your video.
A card sitting on the canvas has no position in time, so export has nothing to do with it. To get it into the finished file you drag it onto a timeline track. Two clips that look adjacent on the canvas are still unrelated until they are adjacent on the timeline.
If your export is shorter than you expected, or missing a shot you know you made, check the timeline rather than the canvas.
A working order
Section titled “A working order”- Plan on the canvas. One board per scene, related cards inside it.
- Import or generate the media for each scene into its board.
- Assemble the timeline from that material, in order.
- Check specific moments by scrubbing the playhead and watching the program monitor.
- Export.
Steps 1 and 2 are optional. You can drag files straight onto the timeline and never open Storyboard. The canvas earns its keep on projects with more shots than you can hold in your head.