User guide

The board

The board is an open canvas. Shots sit where you put them, and the reading order is the arrangement — left to right, top to bottom, the way a page reads. Move a shot and you have changed the cut.

• Tap a card to select it. Selected, it shows a ⋯ button for its actions.
• Press and hold, then drag, to move it. It glows when it’s ready to move.
• Drag one card onto another to swap their places.
• Press and hold empty canvas to add something exactly there.
• Pinch to zoom, drag to pan.
• Double-tap a shot for its actions, or a note to start typing.

Shots placed close together on the same line are joined by a dotted line: they read as one scene. Pull one away and the link breaks. Reordering works inside a scene, so rearranging two shots doesn’t disturb the rest of the board.

Selecting several

Tap the rectangle-select tool, then drag a box around what you want. Drag any one of them to move the lot; delete them together from the banner at the top. On a Mac there’s no tool to arm — dragging on empty canvas always draws the box.

Recording

The camera opens already framed to the board’s format. Tap the picture to focus and meter there; slide up or down from that spot to correct the exposure; hold to lock focus and exposure. The lens buttons are labelled in millimetres — the real 35mm-equivalent focal length of each camera, so it means the same thing on any iPhone. Turned upright, they fall back to magnification, because a focal length describes a landscape frame.

Stop recording and you land in the trim. Set the in and out points, mute the shot if its sound isn’t wanted, then Done — or Next, which keeps it and returns to the camera for the next one.

A new shot is named after the lens it was taken on. It’s an ordinary name; edit it or clear it.

Importing

⋯ → Extras, or the + button: from Photos or from Files, several at once. Each one goes through the same preparation as a recording — clips through the trim, stills through crop and duration — one after another until the batch is done. A clip in the wrong shape gets a reframe, so you choose what to keep rather than having the middle taken.

Sound

Each shot keeps its own sound unless you mute it. On top of that:

• A voice-over for a shot, recorded from that shot’s own screen.
• A voice-over for the whole board, recorded while the film plays.
• A music bed under everything.

Levels for all three sit in the Audio panel and can be moved at any time — they’re mixed live, so changing one costs nothing.

Playing and exporting

Play runs the board as a film. Tap the middle to pause, the sides to step a cut back or forward, or scrub the timeline. It loops.

Export gives you the film as an MP4, the board as a PDF contact sheet, every shot as its own video, or one still per shot. Frame lines, if set, are burned in.

Working with someone else

Long-press a board in the list and choose Sharing…. You get a six-digit code. Anyone entering it under + → Join with a Code is on the board straight away and can add to it. The code works for a week; the owner can make a New Code at any time, and people already on the board stay on it. Someone who joined can open Sharing too, to pass the current code on.

Sharing also lists who’s on the board. Put your name in your own row there; it’s what the others see, as initials next to the board in their list. A small ring next to a board shows its footage still downloading.

The owner can stop sharing, which takes everyone else off the board. Someone who joined can leave; leaving takes the board off their device and leaves it with everyone else.

Settings

⋯ → Settings, and they apply to this device, not to one board:

• Recording quality, 360p to 4K. Applies to shots added from then on.
• Appearance, to hold the app in light or dark whatever the system does.
• Snap to grid.
• Rebuild previews, if a looping preview came out wrong.

Keyboard

With a hardware keyboard, on iPad or Mac: