Slide settings

The Slide settings panel at the top right of the window 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 speed and volume in the stage controls under the output preview on the left change only what is playing right now. They are not saved. The values you change in Slide settings are saved with the slide. For which panel is which, see The main window.

Loading a slide into the panel

Click a thumbnail and the slide goes live. The panel does not follow — it stays on what it was showing.

Do this	This happens
Click the thumbnail	It goes live. The panel stays as it was
Option-click / Alt-click the card	It does not go live; it loads into Slide settings
Click the name line under the card	Same — it loads into Slide settings
Right-click the card → Slide settings	Same
Double-click the name line	Opens the slide in the slide editor

That is what Option + slide to load beside the panel heading means. On Windows it reads Alt + slide to load.

The split is deliberate

You need to be able to set up the next slide while one is still on screen. What is live stays as it is while you work on the next one here.

The panel has its own small preview, with a ▶ button and a progress bar. It plays separately from the stage, and it stays silent while anything on stage — or the music — is making sound.

When the window is too narrow for the panel, it folds into a slim summary column at the right end of the band: the slide’s name, its kind and format, the four Scale icons and a Crop & fit button (a pencil on a text slide). Nothing pops out by itself. To see the whole panel, click Slide settings at the top of that column (Open in a window), or right-click a card and choose Slide settings: the panel opens as a Slide settings window beside LayerCue, lined up with its top edge. Clicking a card’s name or Option-clicking / Alt-clicking it loads the slide but does not open the window; if the window is already open, it comes to the front. Close it with its ✕. Widen LayerCue enough and the panel moves back into the band by itself.

The same panel also handles songs: choose Track settings on a song in the music panel and the panel switches over to it. See Music.

What is where

The value	Where it is
Kind · size · length	The line under the title: the kind badge, then the size and frame rate (video), the size and file type (image) or the best quality YouTube offers, such as up to 1080p — then the length between your in and out points
Scale	The four icons in the panel · also inside Crop & fit · or right-click a card → Crop & fit
Crop · Anchor	The Crop & fit sheet — open it with the gear at the top right of the thumbnail
To Screen	The button under the thumbnail
Slide volume	The purple bar beside To Screen
Preview ▶ and timecode	The left end of the row under the progress bar
Playback speed	The speed chip (1×) in that row
Repeat · Loop crossfade	The repeat button beside the speed chip
Set as thumbnail	The picture icon beside it
In point · Out point · Clear In/Out	The right end of that row
Captions · Audio · Download	Rows that appear on YouTube slides
Copy style · Paste style	Buttons that appear on text slides

The progress bar and everything in the row under it appear only on things with a timeline — video, audio and YouTube.

The gear on the thumbnail

• Images, videos, and YouTube playing from its Downloaded file: the gear opens the Crop & fit sheet
• YouTube playing as Streaming: there is no gear — a stream can’t be cropped. Three of the Scale icons are there (see below); for a crop, download it first
• Text slides: the gear is a pencil, and it opens the slide in the slide editor
• Music (audio) slides: the gear opens the sheet, but there is no picture, so the middle says only Can’t crop this kind (download YouTube first)

Scale

Decides what happens when the screen and the picture have different proportions. The four icons run in this order from the left. A new slide starts on Fit.

	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 leftover space empty	When nothing may be cut off
Fit + blur bg	Fills the leftover space with a blurred copy of the same picture	When a vertical video goes on a horizontal screen

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

To change several slides at once, select them, right-click one of them and open Crop & fit. Fill, Stretch, Fit, Fit + blur bg and Clear crop there go to every selected slide, and LayerCue tells you how many it changed. Set crop area… at the bottom opens the sheet for the slide you right-clicked. The menu works for images, videos and Downloaded YouTube; on other slides it is greyed out.

While YouTube plays as a stream

Fill, Stretch and Fit work as they do for a video. Fit + blur bg is not offered — LayerCue can’t reach the picture inside the YouTube player to blur it — and a slide that was set to it shows as Fit. The crop and Anchor are not used either — the picture always sits in the middle. Download it and switch to Downloaded, and it behaves exactly like a video.

Crop & fit

The gear opens the Crop & fit sheet. The large picture at the top is where you set the crop; under it are Result, Scale and Anchor. Every change is saved the moment you make it — Done at the top right just closes the sheet.

Setting the crop

Mark the part you want to keep on the large picture.

• Drag inside the 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 shaded, and thirds guides are drawn inside the frame
• Neither the width nor the height goes below 5%

To set it by number, type into the four boxes under the picture — L, T, R and 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 what is cut, not what is kept

They are the % trimmed from that side. 10 in the L box means 10% comes off the left. If a side and its opposite together would leave less than 5%, the number is cut back so that 5% remains.

Clear crop, to the right of the boxes, removes the crop. Scale and Anchor stay as they were.

Why the picture you crop on is not the shape of the output

It is drawn at the original proportions. If the output’s empty edges were drawn in too, you would place the crop against them and it would come out wrong. For video, the picture is a frame LayerCue took from the original file, before any crop.

Only images, videos and YouTube playing from its Downloaded file can be cropped.

Result · Anchor

Result, at the bottom left of the sheet, shows the crop, Scale and Anchor applied together, drawn at the aspect ratio of the output — or, when the video sits in a video box, in the shape of that box. Video is shown as a still frame here.

Anchor, at the bottom right, 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 (there is no leftover space and nothing spills over)

Videos in a box

A slide’s video can also sit in a video box on the slide instead of filling the screen — see Design tools. Everything on this page still applies to it; the crop, Scale and Anchor simply work inside the box. Extra videos you add to the same slide have a fit and a crop of their own: select one in the editor and press Crop and fit video, and this sheet opens for that box under the title Video box settings. They have no In or Out point and no speed.

To Screen

To Screen puts the slide that is in the panel on screen without playing it. A video is held on the frame where the progress bar here stands — if you have not moved the progress bar, that is the in point. Start it with ▶ in the stage controls.

To Screen is the only thing that uses the progress bar position. Clicking a card always starts from the in point, wherever you left the preview. And unlike a click, To Screen sends the slide again even when it is already live — move the progress bar and press it again.

Moving one frame at a time

Click the progress bar once, then ← → move one frame. Hold Shift for 10 frames. Hovering over the timecode shows the same hint.

Playback speed

Press the speed chip (1×) and set the speed with − / + or the slider: from 0.25× to 3×, in steps of 0.05. Reset to 1× puts it back. Any speed other than 1× shows on the chip in colour.

The length written on the card takes the speed into account, as well as the in and out points.

There are two speed chips

They look the same but they do different things.

Which chip	What it does
The chip in the stage controls on the left	Changes only what is playing right now. Not saved
The chip in Slide settings	Saved with the slide. It applies every time the slide goes out
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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.

Play or drag the preview to the moment you want, then press the left-arrow button (In point) or the right-arrow button (Out point). Once set, the button fills in and shows the time. The ✕ beside them (Clear In/Out) clears both at once.

• Set an in point at or after the out point and the out point is cleared for you
• An out point at or before the in point is ignored
• YouTube takes in and out points even while it is streaming

What the out point does depends on the layer and on Repeat

Layer	Repeat on	Repeat off
Foreground	Goes back to the in point and plays on	The slide comes down, using the presentation’s Fade out
Background	Goes back to the in point and plays on	Stops and holds on that frame
Overlay	A video goes back to the in point and plays on	Stops and holds on that frame — the overlay stays up until you clear it

Press ▶ while a background or overlay video is held on its out point and it plays again from the in point.

Repeat is explained further down this page. The layers themselves are in Layers.

Without an out point, a video that plays to its end with Repeat off stays on its last frame — on any layer, and in a video box too — until you take it down or send something in its place.

YouTube chapters

A YouTube video split into chapters shows the splits as ticks on the progress bar, and a row appears above it: the chapter you are in, then Previous chapter and Next chapter.

• Next chapter goes to the start of the next chapter. It greys out on the last one
• Previous chapter 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

LayerCue asks YouTube for the chapter list without downloading the video, so it takes a few seconds the first time you load that slide. After that it remembers the list, even after you restart. The stage has its own chapter buttons while such a video is live — see YouTube.

Repeat · Loop crossfade

The repeat button sits beside the speed chip. Its icon shows the state on its own — hover over it and it reads Loop or Play once. Press it for the rest:

Repeat	The switch. On, and the slide starts again when it reaches the end
Loop crossfade	How long the end overlaps the start on each loop, from 0 to 5 seconds. Shown while Repeat is on
Use default	Hands the crossfade back to the value in Settings

While it follows Settings, the panel says Using the default from Settings. That default is Settings › Stage › Background loop crossfade, which starts at 0 — a hard cut. See Settings.

Before you touch it, the layer decides

Until you choose, Repeat is on for a slide that goes out on the background and off everywhere else. A background is scenery, so it loops; a foreground slide is something you show and finish. It goes by the layer the slide actually goes out on — a presentation can force one, see Presentation settings. A video in a video box is part of the slide rather than its background, so it plays once even on a background slide.

Choosing it by hand makes it stick

Once you have switched Repeat on or off yourself, that choice 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 only on the background

The overlap is drawn by the background layer, and only for a video file. On the other layers Repeat still repeats, but the join is a cut. A clip shorter than twice the crossfade jumps back to the start without overlapping. The crossfade plays the clip twice at once, so a 4K video with Fit + blur bg can be heavy.

Slide volume

The purple bar beside To Screen. Click or drag it to set anything from 0 to 100% — the number is shown on the right. The speaker icon switches between 0% and 100%. Video and YouTube slides have it. An audio slide shows it too, but does not use it — see the note on audio slides below.

When the slide goes out, this value becomes the volume of the layer it is on. The layer volume in the stage controls starts from it; moving that changes only what is playing now and is not saved. The master volume applies on top of every layer — see Sound and the meter. Change Slide volume while the slide is live on the foreground or the background and the stage follows.

The background keeps its own volume

A slide keeps two values: one for the background, and one for the foreground and overlays. The first time you put a slide on the background, its volume goes to 0% — backgrounds are usually there for atmosphere. Move it back and the value it had before returns. Whatever you set while it is on the background is kept for the next time it goes there. A video in a video box keeps its sound on a background slide.

YouTube captions and audio

Load a YouTube slide and a Captions row appears. The button shows the language that is on, or Captions Off. Press it to pick from Captions Off and the languages you have registered; ● marks the one that is on.

The captions choice belongs to the app, not to the slide. It applies to the YouTube in the preview and to the one live on stage at the same time, and it is not saved with the slide. Each time LayerCue starts, captions begin from Settings › Files & YouTube › Default captions — Off (the starting value) or English.

Captions are YouTube’s own, so they show only while a slide plays as Streaming. A Downloaded file has none. How they look is set once for the whole app, in Settings › Files & YouTube: Caption position, Caption font and Caption size — see YouTube.

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

• Type in the field at the top and the list filters as you type. It matches the start of a language name or code, 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
• At first the list holds your computer’s language and English
• Press OK when you are done

On a Mac the language names follow the app’s language. On Windows they do too when Windows’ display language is the app’s language; otherwise they are in English.

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.

Once a YouTube video starts playing and YouTube reports its audio tracks, an Audio row appears below Captions. A video with dubbing lists each language there. Pick one and the choice is saved with the slide.

Downloading a YouTube slide

A YouTube slide plays as a stream until you download it. Press Download in the panel: the row shows Downloading with a percentage, then Converting if the file needs converting. ✕ cancels. If a download fails, LayerCue tells you.

If the download finishes while the slide is still in the panel, the slide switches to Downloaded by itself. From then on, two buttons — Streaming and Downloaded — choose which one plays; the lit one is in use. On Downloaded the slide is handled exactly like an ordinary video: the gear, the crop, Set as thumbnail. Switching back to Streaming puts YouTube’s own picture back on the card.

More about downloading is in YouTube.

Set as thumbnail

Choose the picture the card uses yourself. Stop the preview on the frame you want, then press the picture icon. It is there on video slides and on YouTube playing from its Downloaded file.

It does not photograph the screen. It writes the current position into the slide and takes that frame from the original file again, so the same frame comes back even if the stored thumbnail is thrown away.

The picture it picks on its own

If you do not choose one, LayerCue takes the frame at 5 seconds, because so many videos start on black — or one near the end, if the video is shorter than that. The saved picture is always the uncropped original, and the card lays the crop and Scale over it, so the card follows the moment you change the crop.

Copy style · Paste style

On a text slide, two buttons appear under the four Scale icons.

• Copy style takes the style of the first text box on this slide
• Paste style applies it to every text box on this slide — except boxes given the role Decoration (skipped by text fill and bulk style) or Backdrop in the editor

What travels is the look of the text (font, size, colour, outline, shadow, alignment, spacing) and of the box (fill, border, corners, shadow, opacity). Position, size, rotation, the box’s role and the words themselves stay as they are.

To style many slides at once, select them, right-click one of them and choose Paste style. The style clipboard is shared with the slide editor, where the same pair is ⌥⌘C / ⌥⌘V (Ctrl+Alt+C / Ctrl+Alt+V).

What each kind can do

Slide kind	Gear	Crop	Speed · In/Out · Repeat	Slide volume	Set as thumbnail
Video	Opens Crop & fit	○	○	○	○
Image	Opens Crop & fit	○	—	—	—
Text	A pencil — opens the slide editor	—	—	—	—
YouTube — Streaming	None	—	○	○	—
YouTube — Downloaded	Opens Crop & fit	○	○	○	○

Audio slides

A slide with the Music badge is sound only and does not go on a layer. Clicking it plays it on the music channel, and of the values on this page it uses only the In point and Out point. See Music.

When editing is locked

While editing is locked, the values on this page cannot be changed — with two exceptions. Slide volume always changes, because on stage you must be able to pull the sound down, and so does the captions language, which belongs to the app rather than the slide. If you see Editing is locked while presenting, this is why.

To unlock, press the padlock at the right of the status bar (Unlock editing). When editing is unlocked, the same button is a pencil (Lock editing).

Turn on Lock editing while live in Settings › Stage and LayerCue locks editing by itself the first time you send something out while an output window is open, and unlocks it once every output window is off again. See Screens and going live.

Undo

Comes back with ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z	Does not come back
Crop · Scale · Anchor · playback speed · In point · Out point · Repeat · Loop crossfade · Audio · Streaming / Downloaded · Paste style	Slide volume · the captions language

Setting changes that follow each other within 1.5 seconds are merged into one step — drag a slider for a long time and one undo still covers it. Volume is something you work live on stage, so it is never put on the undo list.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	What it does
Option-click / Alt-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 / Ctrl+Z	Undo the setting you changed a moment ago

All the shortcuts are in Keyboard shortcuts.

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If the slide is deleted while its Crop & fit sheet is open, your next change closes the sheet instead of landing on another slide. If something is not working, see When something goes wrong or write to support@layercue.com.