Working with the timeline
The timeline at the bottom of the video editor is where your project physically lives: every caption, video clip, image and soundtrack is an item on a track. This guide covers the moves that make timeline work fast — selecting many items at once, the right-click menu, splitting, merging and getting new media onto a track.
The timeline at a glance
Each horizontal row is a track, and each block on it is an item — captions show a T, video, image and audio items show their own icons. The vertical line is the playhead: it marks the exact moment shown in the preview above, and several tools (like Split) act wherever it stands.
In the bottom corner you'll find the zoom controls — zoom in for frame-accurate work, out for the big picture — and Hide timeline when you want the full height of the screen for the preview. Press Space to play and pause from wherever you are.
Selecting items — one, several, or a whole region
- Click Selects a single item. Clicking an empty part of the timeline clears the selection.
- Shift-click or Cmd-click Adds an item to the selection, or removes one that's already selected — build up exactly the set you want, even across tracks.
- Click and drag on empty space Draws a selection box. Everything the box touches — on every track it crosses — becomes selected. The fastest way to grab a whole region of your project.
Moving and trimming
Drag any selected item to move it along its track — and if it's part of a multi-selection, the whole selection moves together, keeping the relative spacing intact. That's how you shift an entire scene half a second without touching each caption individually.
Every item also has trim handles on its left and right edge. Drag them to shorten or extend the item — for captions that adjusts timing, for video clips it reveals or hides more of the underlying footage.
The right-click menu
Right-click any item for the quick actions: Duplicate, Copy, Paste (enabled once something is on the clipboard) and Delete. The same menu works on tracks.
Keyboard fans: Backspace deletes whatever is selected — including a multi-selection in one stroke.
Splitting an item
Select an item, place the playhead where you want the cut, and press Split in the toolbar. The item becomes two independent pieces at exactly the playhead position — the playhead must stand inside the item, not at its very edge.
Splits are smart about content: a split video clip keeps playing from the right spot in the source footage on both sides of the cut, and a split caption keeps its timing intact. Split is how you carve out room for a pause, cut away a section, or restyle half of a long caption separately.
Merging captions
Select two or more captions and press Merge to combine them into one. Three rules decide when merging is possible:
- Same track All selected items must live on the same track.
- Captions only Merge works on text captions — video, image and audio items can't be merged.
- No gaps in the selection The selected captions must be neighbours — if an unselected item sits between them, the Merge button stays disabled.
The merged caption spans from the start of the first to the end of the last, joins the text with spaces — and keeps the word-level timing, so word-by-word subtitle animations still land on the right beats.
Getting media onto the timeline
Drag a file from your computer straight onto the editor and drop it — Inwista uploads it and places it as a new item where a placeholder shows the upload progress. Media from the editor's side panels (your workspace assets, stock images and video, generated music) can be added to the timeline the same way from their panels.
Need another layer — say a logo that overlays the whole video, or a second subtitle style? Click New track in the toolbar and drag items onto it. The toolbar's Duplicate button is track-aware too: it copies your selection onto a fresh track, so you can experiment on a duplicate while the original stays untouched.