Timeline basics
Plan your shoot on a visual timeline with streams, items, and flexible zoom.
The Timeline is a visual plan of your shoot, laid out over time — much like the timeline in a video editor. Each department gets its own track, and you place blocks of time on it for scenes, setups, moves, and meals. Open it from Timeline in the project sidebar.
Before diving in, it's worth knowing the one rule that shapes everything: the timeline is a working draft, and editing it never changes your bookings or call sheets until you choose to push the change out. See How scheduling works.
Streams
A stream is a horizontal track, usually one department or unit — "Camera Dept", "Lighting", "Art". A stream can have sub-streams beneath it, such as "A Camera" and "B Camera" under Camera. Add one with + Stream.
Each stream's ⋮ menu lets you rename it, set a Color, link it to crews and roles, and delete it. The colour is used to tell streams apart on the grid and in the Timing view; every stream starts with a distinct default colour, and you can change it any time.
Items
An item is a block of time on a stream — a scene, a setup, a company move, a lunch. Items have a start and an end, a type (work, travel, break, off, or hold), and can be tied to a location. You place, drag, and resize items directly on the grid. An item can also be marked all-day.
A milestone is a different kind of marker — a single point in time rather than a block, such as a delivery date. Milestones show as diamonds on the grid.
📷 Screenshot:
/images/docs/timeline/timeline-editor.pngThe timeline with several streams and items across a shoot day. Alt: A timeline editor showing horizontal department streams with time blocks laid across them.
Getting around
The top bar gives you the controls to work at any scale:
- View — switch between the Editor (this track-based view) and the Timing view.
- Date navigation — arrows and a Today button to move through the schedule.
- Zoom — switch between day, week, and month.
- Times — toggle time labels on and off.
- Snap — make items snap to a grid (1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes, or 1 hour) as you drag and resize them.
- Export — download the timeline.
You can switch between multiple timelines, and create a new one when you need a fresh plan.
Locations
Items can be tied to a location so the place shows on the item and can flow through to call sheets later. You manage the places used in your production — adding, editing, and organising them — in the separate Locations tool, which keeps location names consistent across the whole project.
What the timeline feeds
The timeline is the source your bookings and call sheets can be built from — but only when you decide to. Two things make that connection:
- Linking streams to crew roles, so the right people get the right schedule — see Linking crew and roles.
- Snapshots and re-seeding / propagating, which is how the plan actually reaches bookings and call sheets — see Snapshots and Propagating changes.