Slide settings

The Slide settings panel on the right handles the values that are saved with a single slide. Set them once and that slide goes out that way every time.

These are not the values you touch on stage

The volume and playback speed in the stage controls on the left change only what is on screen right now, for the moment. They are not saved. The values you change in Slide settings on the right are the ones that are saved. For which panel is which, see The main window.

Loading a slide into the panel

Click a thumbnail and it goes live right there. The right panel does not follow.

Do this	This happens
Click the thumbnail	It goes live. The right panel stays as it was
Option + click	It does not go live; it loads into Slide settings
Click the name line under the card	Same — it loads into Slide settings

That is what Option + slide to load next to the panel heading means.

The split is deliberate

You need to be able to set up the next slide while one is still on screen. The picture that is live stays as it is while you work on the next one on the right.

Where everything is

The value	Where it is
Scale	The four icons in the right panel · or right-click a slide → Crop & fit
Crop · Anchor	The Crop & fit sheet — open it with the gear at the top right of the thumbnail
Playback speed	The speed chip (1×) under the progress bar
In point · Out point · Clear In/Out	The arrow buttons under the progress bar
Slide volume	The purple bar under the thumbnail
Set as thumbnail	The picture icon under the progress bar
Captions (YouTube)	The captions row, on YouTube slides only
Audio (YouTube dubs)	The row below it, on videos with more than one track

To close the sheet, press Done at the top right.

When there is no gear

• Web slides have no gear at all. There is nothing to set
• Music slides show the gear, but there is no picture to crop, so the sheet shows only Can’t crop this kind
• YouTube shows the gear only while it is playing from the Downloaded file
• On a text slide with no image or video the gear becomes a pencil, and pressing it opens the text editing screen

Scale

Decides what happens when the screen and the picture have different proportions. The four icons run in this order from the left.

	What it does	When to use it
Fill	Fills the screen and cuts off whatever spills over	When no empty edges may show
Stretch	Ignores the proportions and stretches the picture to the screen	When the original ratio is off by a little
Fit	Puts the whole picture in and leaves the rest black	When nothing may be cut off (the starting value)
Fit + blur bg	Lays a blurred copy of the same picture in the leftover space	When a vertical video goes on a horizontal screen

Fit + blur bg looks the same on the card as it does on the live output, because the strength of the blur is worked out from the height of the screen.

While YouTube plays as a stream, the four become two

Fill and Stretch both act as fill-the-screen, and Fit and Fit + blur bg both act as leave-the-edges. No blurred background appears either. Download it and switch to Downloaded and it behaves exactly like a video. Web slides do not have this row.

Setting the crop

Press the gear to open the Crop & fit sheet. Mark the part you want to keep on the large picture at the top.

• Drag inside the blue frame to move the whole area at once
• Drag the white handles on the four corners and four edges to change its size
• The part being cut away is covered in shadow, and thirds guides are drawn inside
• Neither width nor height shrinks below 5%

To set it by number, type into the four boxes under the picture — L · T · R · B, for left, top, right and bottom — then press Enter or click elsewhere. Values run from 0 to 95, to one decimal place.

The numbers are not the part you keep

They are the % trimmed from that side. 10 in the left box means 10% comes off the left. If a side and its opposite add up to more than 95%, the values are trimmed for you so that 5% is left.

To undo it, use Clear crop to the right of the number boxes. Scale and Anchor are left as they were.

Why the editing picture is not the shape of the live output

The picture you work on is drawn at the original proportions. If the black edges were drawn in too, you would place the crop against those edges and it would come out wrong. For video, the app uses a frame it baked earlier — the original frame before any crop — as the base picture.

Only images, videos and YouTube playing from a Downloaded file can be cropped. For anything else the middle of the sheet shows only Can’t crop this kind (download YouTube first).

Result · Anchor

Result, at the bottom left of the sheet, shows the crop, Scale and Anchor all applied together. It is drawn at the aspect ratio of the live output. Video is shown as a still frame and does not play here.

Anchor, at the bottom right of the sheet, is a 3×3 grid — press one cell.

When Scale is	What Anchor decides
Fill	Which side is kept and which is cut
Fit · Fit + blur bg	Which side the leftover space goes to
Stretch	Nothing at all (there is no leftover space and no overflow)

Playback speed

Press the speed chip (1×) under the progress bar and set it with − / + or the slider. From 0.25× to 3×, in steps of 0.05. Reset to 1× puts it back.

The speed chip appears only on video, music and YouTube. It does not appear on image or text slides.

There are two speed chips

They look the same but they behave differently.

Which chip	What it does
The chip in the stage controls on the left	Changes only what is on screen right now. Not saved
The chip in Slide settings on the right	Saved with the slide. It applies the next time the slide goes out too
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In point · Out point

Use these to trim the slack at the front of a video or the tail at the end.

Watch the preview and, at the moment you want, press the left arrow (In point) or the right arrow (Out point) under the progress bar. Once set, the button turns blue and the time is written on it. To clear them, use the ✕ beside them (Clear In/Out). Both values go together.

• Set an in point after the out point and the out point is cleared for you
• Set an out point before the in point and nothing happens
• YouTube can take in and out points even while it is streaming
• You can do this while a different YouTube is out on stage. The one here stays silent

The out point does a different thing on each layer

On the Slide layer, reaching the out point stops the output. On Background or Overlay, it rewinds to the in point and repeats. This is how you loop a background video forever.

Nudging one frame at a time

Click the progress bar once, and ← → move one frame at a time. Hold Shift for 10 frames. Hovering the timecode shows the same hint.

It ties into To Screen

To Screen does not play. It puts the position you set on the progress bar on the screen and holds it there. If you have not touched the progress bar yet, it goes to that slide’s starting point.

To Screen is the only thing that uses the progress bar position. Click a card to send it out normally and it always starts at the in point — wherever you were scrubbing here does not follow it onto the stage.

YouTube chapters

Videos split into chapters show those splits as ticks on the progress bar, and a row appears above it: the chapter you are in on the left, two buttons on the right.

• Forward goes to the start of the next chapter
• Back goes to the start of the chapter you are in. Press it again straight away and you move to the one before — so one press replays the chapter you are on
• The forward button greys out on the last chapter

The chapter list is read from YouTube without downloading the video, so it takes a couple of seconds the first time you open that slide. After that LayerCue remembers it.

The ticks are on the stage bar too

While a video with chapters is going out, the progress bar under the output preview carries the same ticks. That bar covers only what actually goes out, so chapters outside your in and out points are left off it.

Repeat · Loop crossfade

The button sits in the control row with the others, on anything that has a timeline. Its icon carries the state on its own — Loop or Play once — and the rest is inside.

Repeat	On, and the slide starts again when it reaches the end
Loop crossfade	How long the end overlaps the start on each loop
Use default	Hands the crossfade back to the value in Settings

While it is following Settings the panel says Using the default from Settings.

Before you touch it, the layer decides

A slide sitting on the background repeats; everything else plays once. Background is scenery, so it loops. A foreground slide is something you show and finish.

Choosing it by hand makes it stick

Once you have picked Repeat or Play once yourself, that answer wins from then on — moving the slide between foreground and background will not flip it back. If a background slide suddenly plays only once, this is usually why.

The crossfade happens on the background

The overlap is drawn by the background, so it is there when the slide is on the background layer. On the other layers Repeat still repeats; the join is a hard cut. With In point or Out point set, the app rewinds to the in point itself.

The default for every slide is in Settings › Stage › Background loop crossfade.

Slide volume

Click or drag the purple bar under the thumbnail to set it between 0 and 100%. The speaker icon toggles between 0% and 100%. The number is shown on the right as well. It appears only on video, music and YouTube slides.

This value is that slide’s share. The layer volume and then the master volume are multiplied onto it.

Moving a slide to the background sets its volume to 0

The moment you put a slide on the Background layer this value closes to 0%, and moving it back to the Slide layer returns it to 100%. Backgrounds are usually laid down for atmosphere. A value you set by hand after that is left alone.

YouTube captions

Pick a YouTube slide and a captions icon and a Captions row appear in the right panel. The button beside it is the language now on; press it and the ones you can pick are listed. With none on it reads Captions Off.

Manage languages… at the bottom of that list opens the Caption languages window.

• Type a name or a code in the top field and the list filters as you type. It matches from the start, so “kor” is enough
• Click a row and a check appears on the left; click again to take it off. The small text on the right is the language code
• Language names are written in the language the app is set to — set the app to English and you get English names
• It starts with your computer’s language and English
• Press OK when you are done

Why you register them

YouTube offers over a hundred auto-translations. Listing all of them turns picking one into a job you do not want mid-show. Register the ones you use and the picker is three or four lines.

The picker shows eight at most

Register more than eight and only the first eight reach the caption picker.

What a slide starts with is set by Settings › Files & YouTube › Default captions.

Set as thumbnail

Choose the picture the card uses yourself. Park the video on the frame you want in the preview, then press the picture icon under the progress bar. It appears only on video slides.

It does not photograph the screen. It writes the current position onto the slide and pulls that point out of the original again. So the same frame comes back even after the thumbnail is deleted.

The picture it bakes on its own

If you do not choose one, video is pulled from the 5-second mark, because so many videos start on black (near the end if the video is very short). The picture that gets saved is always the uncropped original, and the card lays the crop and Scale over it — so the card follows along the moment you change the crop later.

Copy style · Paste style

The two buttons appear at the bottom of the right panel only when you have selected a text slide with no image or video.

Copy style takes the style of the first text box on that slide. Paste style applies it to every text box on the slide at once.

Position, size and the words themselves are not style, so they do not travel.

What each kind can do

Slide kind	Gear (sheet)	Crop	Speed · In/Out	Slide volume
Video	Opens	○	○	○
Image	Opens	○	—	—
Text	Becomes a pencil and opens the text editing screen	—	—	—
Music	Opens (nothing to crop)	—	○	○
YouTube — Streaming	None	—	○	○
YouTube — Downloaded	Opens	○	○	○
Web	None	—	—	—

To crop a YouTube slide, Download it first and then press the Downloaded button. From then on it is handled exactly like an ordinary video.

When editing is locked while live

Changes made inside the sheet are dropped silently

While Lock editing is on, crop, Scale and Anchor changes inside the sheet, and Paste style, are thrown away with no message at all. It looks as though the value went back on its own. Unlock it first with the padlock at the right of the status bar (Unlock editing).

Scale, playback speed, In point and Out point changed in the right panel do say so: the notice Editing is locked while presenting appears, so you know you were blocked. Slide volume alone always changes, lock or no lock — on stage you have to be able to pull the sound down.

Undo

Comes back	Does not come back
Crop · Scale · Anchor · playback speed · In point·Out point	Slide volume

Undo with ⌘Z. Moves that follow each other within 1.5 seconds are merged into one step — drag a slider for a long time and one ⌘Z still covers it. Volume is a value you work live on stage, so it is not put on the undo stack.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	What it does
Option + click	Load into Slide settings without going live
← →	After one click on the progress bar — one frame back or forward
Shift + ← →	Ten frames back or forward
⌘Z	Undo the setting you changed a moment ago

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If the slide is deleted while its sheet is open, the sheet closes itself so that the values are not written onto the wrong slide. If something is not working, see Help or write to [email protected].