FNS_TimelineTools

Media on the timeline #

Pick a movie file, an audio file, or both. The tool loads them, locks their playback to the timeline rather than letting them run on their own clock, and can either resize the timeline to the longest one or trim them to fit the range you already have.

That last part is a window, not just a length. A timeline whose range starts at frame 100 is already 99 frames into the song when the range opens, so trimming from the beginning of the file would play the right duration of the wrong part. The media window carries an offset as well as a length, and everything downstream — playback and drawing alike — reads the same window.

Sync Timeline to Media resizes the range to fit; with it off, the media is trimmed to the range instead. Either way playback stays locked to the timeline.

Scope: which timeline? #

TouchDesigner has more than one timeline. Any component can carry a local timeline with its own range and transport, swapped into the UI with the S button and back out with /.

Scope picks which one this tool drives: the root timeline, or a named component's local one. Ensure Local Timeline creates a local timeline on that component if it does not have one — a bare Time COMP is an empty shell, so it is cloned from the root's rather than created blank.

The background #

The tool draws behind two of TD's surfaces, and it is the single owner of both: the strip in the timeline's frame-ruler band, and the Animation editor's background. The timeline strip gets its own row rather than stealing height from the transport controls.

What it draws is a composite of three layers, not a choice between them:

• Filmstrip — thumbnails sampled evenly across the movie. It is baked once on Build Strip and then costs nothing; it does not rebuild itself when the media changes, which is exactly what keeps it free.
• Waveform — the audio, drawn live.
• Markers — vertical coloured lines, in front of both.

Each layer has its own Show toggle and opacity, per surface, and each has a toggle and slider in the control row. Hiding one is not merely cosmetic: a hidden layer stops rendering altogether.

The waveform #

The Animation editor view is interactive. The graph can be zoomed and panned, and the waveform stays pinned between the range markers while that happens — it scrolls and scales with the view instead of being stretched to whatever is on screen.

The timeline strip is a different shape and a different job: it is 64:1 and always holds the whole range, so it works as an overview while the graph view works as an editing surface. Both are rendered from one set of audio, and either can be switched off on its own.

Resolution is how many points the wave is drawn with across the whole file — higher reads more detail when you zoom in, at the cost of GPU points. Wave Height, Wave Color and Wave Opacity are the rest.

Markers from your editor #

Cut your edit somewhere else, then bring the structure back. Point Marker File at a marker list exported from your editor and the tool draws each marker as a vertical coloured line across both surfaces.

Where it came from	How to export it
DaVinci Resolve	Timelines ▸ Export ▸ Timeline Markers to EDL — names and colours come across
Premiere Pro	File ▸ Export ▸ Markers (CSV) — names come across; Premiere does not put colours in that file
Final Cut / Resolve XML	any FCPXML with markers in it
Audacity	a label track (Export Labels) — handy for music you cued by ear

The format is worked out from what is inside the file, not from its extension, so a marker list saved under the wrong name still loads.

Timecodes need to know their frame rate. Source Frame Rate is the rate of the timecodes in the file, not your timeline's — leave it at 0 to assume they match. Nothing here ever changes your timeline's rate.

Source Start Timecode handles sequences that start at 01:00:00:00, which is most of them out of Resolve: left on auto the tool drops the leading hour so the markers land where you expect.

Time Base decides what a marker time means. Timeline is seconds from the start of your working range and works with no media loaded at all. Media ties markers to the picture, so if the media sits at an offset inside the range the markers move with it.

Hover a line to see its name. The label follows the marker, in both the timeline strip and the Animation editor, and disappears when you move away. Names are hover-only on purpose: seven of them across a 60-pixel strip would overlap into noise, and the one you want is the one under the pointer. Hover Labels turns it off; Label Size and Label Color are the rest.

The remaining look controls: Marker Color (used for markers whose file carried none), Marker Width in screen pixels — held steady however far you zoom the Animation editor — and Marker Height as a share of the surface.

Markers are a list, not a property of the media: the table is yours to edit by hand, add to, or keep across a media change. Merge On Load adds a second file's markers to what is already there instead of replacing them.

Right-click the strip to author them. On a line you get Rename, Set Colour and Delete; on empty strip, Add Marker Here, Add Marker At Playhead and Clear All. The menu names the marker and its frame, so you always know what you are about to change.

Save Markers writes them back out. FNS CSV keeps everything — it is the tool's own columns, and reading it back gives you exactly what you had. Resolve marker EDL goes back into an edit, but an EDL only knows the sixteen Resolve colour names and only stores whole frames, so a hand-picked colour is snapped to the nearest and a marker dropped between frames moves by up to half a frame. The status line tells you how many of each, rather than letting you find out in the edit.

Requires FNS_TimelineRegistry for the timeline surface; the Animation editor background works without it.