Timeline

The Timeline is a project view that lays your series out in time. Episodes run left to right; each row is a track, and the bars you draw on a track are spans that place an arc across the episodes it covers. It shows which story threads run through which episodes, and lets you plan and adjust them across the whole series.

An arc is the idea itself -- a thread running through the show. The Timeline is where you say when it happens.

Do you need arcs?

Not every show does, and being walked through Timeline steps you have no use for is a waste of your time. Your project settings carry a single two-way answer, Timeline arcs, on the Story card -- the pipeline asks for it early, alongside your series format.

Choose Use when your episodes have an order, when characters change across them, or when you plant something now that pays off later. A serial drama, a season-long mystery, anything where watching out of order would spoil something.

Choose Don't use when every episode stands alone -- two characters doing a series of skits, a how-to show, a sketch or anthology series. Nothing carries over, so there is nothing to lay out in time.

Don't use removes every arc and track step from your production pipeline: seasons, world-building events, character arc beats, location and prop state changes, relationship tracks, and placing each episode on the Timeline. They stop appearing in your plan, the guide stops raising them, and they no longer count against your progress. This page stays exactly where it is if you want to use it anyway, and switching back to Use brings every step back with whatever progress you had already made on it.

That answer is about the whole show. Each individual step also has its own Don't create button, for when you use arcs generally but not that particular track.

Layout

• Across -- episodes (columns). Each column can be bound to an episode.
• Down -- tracks (rows). Each track is one thread you are following: "Main plot", "Maya's arc", a world-building thread, a relationship between two characters.

Tracks

A track groups the arcs that belong to one thread, and it is what gives an arc its meaning: the same bar says something different on a seasons track than on a relationships track. You can:

• Create tracks above or below existing ones
• Rename and delete tracks
• Resize a track's height by dragging its bottom edge
• Reorder tracks by dragging their headers
• Collapse a track to a single row with the chevron on its header, when you want it out of the way without deleting it

A new project starts with no tracks -- an empty Timeline is a valid state, and none are created for you. There are three ways to add the first one: click the small + on the left edge of the Timeline, click Create when the guide bar offers to make one for you, or ask the assistant in chat. Each track takes a colour, which its arcs inherit. You can delete every track and go back to an empty Timeline.

Every step that asks for a track offers the same pair of answers -- Create, or Don't create. Declining is a real answer, not work left undone: it settles that step, and you are not asked again for the arcs that track would have held.

The Sequencer also has tracks -- rows of clips in an editing view. Both are horizontal rows of things laid out over time; the Timeline's tracks hold story arcs, the Sequencer's hold picture and sound.

Drawing an arc

There is no "new arc" button. You draw one: press inside a track at the episode where the thread should start, drag sideways to where it should end, and release. A dialog then asks for the arc's name and an optional description.

Once drawn, a span can be moved, and its start and end dragged, to change which episodes it covers.

Episode columns

Columns are bound to episodes in your episode list (or left as empty slots). Click a column header to assign or clear an episode. The column shows the episode title (truncated with a tooltip if it is long).

Use the + buttons to insert or delete columns and to reorder them.

How a span is placed

A span's start and end are expressed as episode positions with percentages -- for example, starting 30% into the second episode and ending 70% into the fifth. That lets an arc begin and end mid-episode rather than only at episode boundaries.

Editing an arc

• Resize -- drag the handles at either end to extend or shorten it
• Move -- drag the middle to shift it (the width is preserved)
• Edit -- click (press and release without dragging) to open the arc's dialog, where you can change its name and description or delete it. The same click selects the arc in the Arc Details panel to the right of the Timeline, which reads back its name, description, and the episode and percentage its start and end land on.

The Arc Details panel is read-only; the divider between it and the Timeline can be dragged to give either side more room.

Zoom

A zoom slider at the foot of the Timeline, with a zoom-out and a zoom-in button either side of it, controls how many episode columns are in view, so you can work comfortably with large episode counts. The mouse wheel zooms as well, keeping the episode under the cursor where it is.