The multi-track timeline, lane by lane

Open a project in ProCut and the bottom two thirds of the screen is the timeline. It is the part of a video editor you actually touch, so it is worth understanding what every row and every gesture is for before you start dragging things around.

What the four lanes do

Reading the screenshot from top to bottom, each row is a lane, and each lane accepts one kind of clip. The icon on the left tells you which is which.

The lane strip scrolls vertically when a project grows past what fits on screen.

The distinction that matters is magnetic versus free. The main video track is magnetic, which is what you want when you are cutting a story down: delete a boring three seconds and everything after it slides back so there is no black gap. Overlay, audio and text lanes are free, which is what you want for a cutaway, a music bed or a caption that has to land on a specific word — nothing else moves when you nudge them.

One ruler, one playhead, one truth

Above the lanes there is a single time ruler, marked 0:00, 0:02, 0:04, 0:06 in the screenshot, and one vertical playhead crossing every lane at once. That sounds obvious, but it is exactly what template-based editors give up: when the caption track and the video track have their own separate scrubbers, you can never be sure which frame a word lands on.

The counter above the ruler reads 0:03 / 0:11 — position over total. Both numbers come from the same timeline model the exporter reads, so the duration you see while editing is the duration of the file you get.

Pinch zoom and frame-level precision

The zoom control sits in the transport bar: −, a percentage, and +. You can tap those, but the fast way is to pinch on the timeline itself.

• Zoomed out — the whole project fits on screen. Good for judging structure: is the intro too long, does the middle sag.
• 100% — roughly what the screenshot shows. Good for ordinary trimming, where you want a couple of seconds either side of the cut.
• Zoomed in — single frames become wide enough to hit with a fingertip. This is where you place a cut on a beat or on a blink.

Zoom never changes the project. It changes how many pixels a second of footage occupies, and nothing else — cut points are stored as frame numbers against the project frame rate, so a cut you make at 800% is the same cut when you zoom back out.

Magnetic snapping, and how to defeat it

Drag a clip edge and it snaps to the nearest meaningful thing: the playhead, another clip's boundary, the start of the project. On phones with a haptic engine you feel a tick when it catches, which is the difference between guessing and knowing on a screen where your finger covers the thing you are aiming at.

Snapping is a convenience, not a cage. Two ways past it:

• Zoom in. Snap distance is measured in pixels, so at high zoom the snap radius covers a fraction of a frame and you can land anywhere.
• Move the playhead first. If you want an edit at an exact time, park the playhead there and let the clip snap to it deliberately.

Thumbnails and waveforms are real data

Look closely at the video lane in the screenshot and you can see the sunset frames change along the clip. The green audio lane shows an actual waveform that rises and falls. Neither is decoration:

• Thumbnail strips are rendered from the clip itself at a spacing that follows your zoom level, so you can find the moment someone turns their head without scrubbing.
• Waveforms are drawn from the decoded audio track. A gap in the wave is silence you can cut; a spike is the clap, the beat drop, or the word you want a caption to hit.

Both are generated during import, alongside the editing proxy, which is why a long clip takes a moment to become fully drawn the first time you add it.

Undo that never runs out

The two arrows on the right of the transport bar are undo and redo. Every edit — a trim, a speed change, a transition, a text tweak — goes onto one history stack, and the stack has no fixed depth. The same stack implementation ships on Android, iPhone, iPad and Mac, so a project behaves identically whichever device you opened it on.

The practical consequence: experiment. There is no state in ProCut you can reach by dragging that you cannot walk back out of.

A five-minute working order

A timeline this flexible is easiest to use in passes rather than all at once. The order that wastes the least time:

1. Rough structure first. Zoomed out, drop everything in, delete the obvious dead weight. Do not touch effects yet.
2. Trim on the beat. Add music to the audio lane, then use the waveform to place cuts where the track wants them.
3. Now the polish. Transitions, speed curves, colour — these consume time from the cut you already like, so they come after the cut is right.
4. Titles last. Text sits on its own lane, so it is the cheapest thing to move; adding it early means re-timing it every time you re-cut.

Next in this series: split, trim and ripple delete — the four gestures that turn footage into a cut.

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