Timeline & Export
Animate, scrub, and produce a final asset — image or video — from your composition.
A Compositor scene can hold static layers and time-varying ones (video, animated parameters). When time matters, you get a timeline; when it's time to ship, you get an export.
Timeline
The timeline lives along the bottom of the canvas. It only renders when the scene has either a video layer or a non-zero Duration set in Canvas properties.
Controls:
- Play / Pause — toggle playback.
- Playhead — drag along the timeline to scrub. All video layers and any animated properties seek together.
- Time readout —
MM:SSfor the current position, paired with the scene's total duration. - Volume / Mute — global toggle for all video layers.
Multi-video sync. Multiple Video layers share the same clock. Scrubbing seeks all of them together. The longest video sets the effective scene length unless you override it in Duration.
Per-layer loop. Each Video layer has its own Loop toggle. Looping is independent of the scene timeline — a 4-second video on a 12-second scene plays through three times if Loop is on, freezes on its last frame if off.
Static scenes have no timeline
If your scene is just images, shapes, and text — no video, no duration — the timeline stays hidden. Set a Duration (in seconds) in Canvas properties to surface the playback controls and enable video export.
Exporting
Export produces a downloadable file from your composition. Open the export dialog from the toolbar — the title bar reads Save Asset.
Captures the current frame as a PNG at the canvas dimensions.
- Progress — a brief
Exporting…state, then the asset uploads. - Use it for — single-frame stills, social posts, deck-ready images.
Renders the scene from 0:00 to its Duration as an MP4.
- Progress — a percent indicator and progress bar; cancel anytime.
- Use it for — animations, looping clips, social-ready video.
Video export takes time
Long or complex scenes take a while to render. The progress bar gives you a live percentage, and cancelling doesn't leave anything stuck — partial output is discarded cleanly.
When the export finishes, the asset uploads to your project's media library and the dialog hands you the downloadable URL.
Downstream output is not export
Exporting writes a file to your storage. Connecting the Compositor's output socket to another node is something else entirely.
Downstream Image, Video, and Compositor nodes consume the scene the Compositor emits. They render it independently — with their own play/pause/seek, their own previews — without producing a file. You don't need to export to feed inference, swap into another Compositor, or preview in a Video node.
Use Export when you want a file out of Fuser (a PNG to drop in a deck, an MP4 to share). Use the output socket for everything that stays inside the flow.