Navigation and playback

The transport bar at the bottom of the window is mission control. Its left-hand buttons change with the mode; everything from the scan buttons rightward is the same in both modes.

Mode buttons

Lock Mode / Unlock Mode — the two toggle buttons at the far left switch the app’s mode (chapter 3). The active mode’s button is highlighted; clicking the already-active one does nothing harmful.

File buttons (change with mode)

In Unlock Mode:

• Open Video — load one file into the selected tile (chapter 5).
• Add Video(s) — load several files into empty tiles (chapter 5).
• Close Video — close the selected tile’s video (chapter 5).
• Set Zero Point — mark the alignment point on the selected tile (chapter 3). Only enabled when the selected tile has a video.

In Lock Mode:

• Open Package, Save Package, Close Package — save and restore complete sessions (chapter 9).

Playback controls

Notes worth knowing:

• Pausing is exact. When you pause, the app settles on a precise frame; in Lock Mode every tile lands on the same aligned instant. What you see is exactly where the clock says you are.
• Frame steps are absolute, and fast. +1f and -1f move to the next/previous frame of the video’s true frame grid — stepping forward ten and back ten always returns you to the identical frame. Stepping forward is effectively instant even with four tiles; stepping backward is a little slower because of how video compression works (see Fast Seek, chapter 11), but still quick.
• Scans mute the audio while they run and put your previous volume/mute state back when they stop.
• Forward scans genuinely play fast. Backward scans work by jumping backwards repeatedly (video files can’t play in reverse), so they look like a rapid series of steps — that’s normal.
• Pressing Play/Pause during a backward scan resumes normal playback rather than freezing. To stop a backward scan and stay paused, press -1f or +1f instead — the scan stops and you rest on a frame.
• A backward scan that reaches the start stops itself at exactly 0:00.

Keyboard shortcuts

The transport is also fully driveable from the keyboard, using the same conventions as QuickTime and the editing suites (Premiere, Avid, Resolve) — if you review footage anywhere else, the muscle memory carries straight over:

Notes:

• The shortcuts press the same controls you’d click, so everything behaves identically: mode-aware (Lock Mode drives the whole group, Unlock Mode the selected tile), frame-exact landings, scans mute, and the paused timecode goes to the clipboard as usual. A shortcut whose button is currently greyed out does nothing.
• J and K differ from the buttons in one convenience: repeated J (or L) presses step through the scan speeds instead of needing separate 2×/4× buttons, and K always parks you on a frame — including during a backward scan, where the Play/Pause button would resume playback instead.
• The 8× and 16× speeds are keyboard-only. The transport buttons deliberately stay at 2×/4×; only repeated J/L presses reach the higher speeds. At 8× and 16× the scan moves as a rapid series of position jumps — the same way backward scans have always worked — rather than smoothly played video. That’s deliberate: it keeps the speed honest at any tile count (playing video forward at 16× would demand more decoding than any machine here can do), and the timeline holds its exact rate in both directions. Forward 2×/4× remain genuine fast playback, unchanged. Pressing K parks every tile exactly on the displayed position.
• The arrow keys step only while paused — during playback they do nothing, exactly as in QuickTime.
• They never fire while you’re typing. With the cursor in a text field — track name, race date, race number, or any editor window — keys type as normal; Space and letters go into the text, not the transport.
• The detached transport window (chapter 15) honours the same shortcuts whenever it’s the focused window.

How the transport differs between modes

The buttons are the same; what they act on is not.

• In Unlock Mode, everything drives the one selected tile. Play plays it alone; the other tiles are paused. Step, scan, scrub — all act on the selected tile only. Selecting a different tile hands the transport to that tile.
• In Lock Mode, everything drives the whole group at once, each tile at its own offset. Play plays all of them; pause freezes all of them on the same aligned instant; a frame step moves every tile one frame; a scan moves the whole timeline. Selection changes only which tile you hear.

The timeline slider and scrubbing

The time display shows position / duration plus the video’s frame rate. In Unlock Mode this is the selected tile’s own timeline; in Lock Mode it’s the shared timeline, where 0:00 is the zero point (chapters 3 and 8).

The slider underneath seeks:

• Click anywhere on the track to jump there.
• Drag the thumb to scrub. Scrubbing pauses playback for the duration of the drag and shows you live frames as you move; release, and playback resumes if it was playing before (always at normal speed).

Scrubbing in Lock Mode moves only the selected tile

There’s one deliberate difference in Lock Mode. While you drag the slider, only the selected tile — the one you’re watching and hearing — follows the drag frame by frame. The other tiles hold their picture until you let go, at which point the whole group snaps back into alignment at the release position.

This is a performance choice, and a big one. Seeking is the most expensive thing you can ask a video decoder to do, and doing it to four high-resolution tiles on every twitch of the slider overwhelms the graphics card — the very thing that makes scrubbing feel like wading through treacle. By previewing on just the tile you’re looking at and realigning the rest on release, dragging stays responsive no matter how many tiles are loaded, and you still end up perfectly aligned the instant you stop. The other tiles aren’t lagging or broken during the drag; they’re simply waiting for you to choose a spot.

If you’d rather have every tile follow the drag live — sensible only with a couple of light tiles on a fast machine — there’s a small scrub-mode toggle in the top toolbar, beside the version number (a tile icon: one square for selected-tile-only, a grid for all-tiles). Off is the default and previews only the selected tile as above; switched on, all tiles scrub together. It’s available only in Lock Mode with two or more videos loaded — with a single video there’s no difference between the two choices, and in Unlock Mode only the selected tile is ever driven, so the toggle is greyed out in those cases. It resets to off each launch.

After a big backward drag you may briefly see a small spinner by the time display — the app is holding the resume until every tile has actually decoded the frame you released on, so playback restarts cleanly instead of stuttering. It rarely lasts more than a second. If backward scrubbing feels heavy on your files, see Fast Seek (chapter 11).

Volume and mute

The speaker button and volume slider control the selected tile — the one tile that’s audible. The mute choice sticks to the tile: mute tile 2, select tile 3 for a while, come back to tile 2 and it’s still muted.

Copy Timecode

Copy Timecode, beside Fast Seek, copies the timecode showing right now to the clipboard — one press, one copy. It’s the manual counterpart of the automatic clipboard writing described in chapter 8, and it is deliberately independent of it: it copies whenever you press it, including when automatic writing is switched off. It’s greyed out when the timeline has no video behind it.

Full detail, including the format and how the two ways of copying relate, is in chapter 8.

Fast Seek and Detach

Two more buttons on the bar open into their own topics:

• Fast Seek re-encodes the loaded videos into seek-friendly copies — chapter 11.
• Detach floats the whole transport bar into its own window — chapter 15.