Rectangle for Video Editors: Timeline, Preview and Reference Without the Shuffle

The panel that lives outside the application

Final Cut Pro, Premiere and Resolve all have sophisticated internal layout systems. Within the application window you can arrange the timeline, inspector, browser and scopes exactly as you like, and save those arrangements as workspaces. That solves half the problem.

The other half is everything the editor does not own: the client's revision notes, a reference cut playing in another player, a shot list in a spreadsheet, a Slack thread with the director, the folder of incoming assets. These are ordinary macOS windows, and the editing application has no opinion about where they go. This is the gap a window manager fills — Rectangle positions the surrounding context so the editing suite itself never has to be resized.

Reference-driven editing

Matching a reference — a mood piece, a previous episode, a competitor's spot — is a comparison task, and comparison tasks want simultaneity. Put the reference player in the right third and the editing application in the left two thirds. The reference plays continuously in peripheral view while you cut, which is a different working experience from pausing to check it every few minutes.

For colour work the arrangement usually inverts. Grading demands the largest possible accurate preview, so the grading application goes full screen and the reference stills move to a second display if one is available. When there is only one screen, the pattern that works is alternating: maximise to grade, restore to compare, maximise again. The restore command in Rectangle app for Mac makes that alternation cheap enough to do dozens of times an hour.

Revision rounds

Client notes arrive as timecoded lists, and working through them means constantly translating between a document and a timeline. The efficient layout is notes in the right third, editor in the left two thirds, with the notes document scrolled to the section you are on. Ticking items off as you go, in view, is measurably better than working from memory and re-reading the list.

• Assembly — editor maximised, nothing else.
• Revisions — editor two thirds, notes one third.
• Review call — editor two thirds, video call one third.
• Delivery — export queue quarter, file browser quarter, spec sheet half.

The delivery layout is the one editors most often skip and most often regret skipping. Checking a deliverable against a spec sheet — codec, frame rate, loudness target, caption file — is exactly the sort of cross-reference that goes wrong when the two documents are not visible at once.

Rendering, exporting and the background problem

Long renders create an awkward state: the machine is busy, you want to keep working, and the progress window keeps getting buried. Pin the export or render queue to a corner quarter and give the rest of the screen to whatever you are doing next. Glancing at a fixed corner is far less disruptive than periodically hunting for a window behind three others.

Two displays, and what goes where

The standard editorial arrangement puts the editing application on the primary display and everything else on the secondary: notes, asset folders, communication, reference. The reasoning is that the timeline benefits from the larger and better-calibrated screen, and context is fine on the other one.

The command that makes dual-display editing comfortable is move-to-next-display, because assets arrive on whichever screen the Finder happened to open on and need relocating constantly. Sending a window across with a keystroke and snapping it into a quarter takes about a second, which is roughly a tenth of what the equivalent drag costs. Rectangle for Mac applies the same shortcuts on both screens, so nothing has to be remembered per display.

Frequently asked questions