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Open Overlay in the sidebar and the timeline shows every effect in the clip as its own card — media overlays, text, sound effects, blurs, and highlights. Effects are free to overlap in time, so Tella lays them out on tracks. You never assign anything to a track yourself: cards that overlap are pushed onto separate tracks so nothing is hidden, and cards that don’t overlap share a track to keep the timeline compact.

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Move and trim a card

  • Drag the start or end of a card to change how long the effect lasts.
  • Drag the card left or right to move it earlier or later in the clip.
  • Hold Option on Mac or Alt on Windows while dragging to turn snapping off.
Card edges snap to nearby card edges, the playhead, and word boundaries. An alignment guide shows the edge Tella used.
The video preview follows the moving edge while you drag a duration handle, so you can land on the exact frame where an effect should start or stop.

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Select and move several cards

You can move several cards together while keeping their timing and spacing:
  1. Hold Cmd on Mac or Ctrl on Windows.
  2. Click cards to add or remove them from the selection, or drag across the timeline to select several cards.
  3. Drag any selected card left or right to move the group.
Tella snaps and constrains the selection as one group. Press Escape to clear the selection.

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Split cards at the playhead

  1. Select one or more cards.
  2. Move the playhead to where you want to cut.
  3. Click Split, press X, or right-click a card and select Split at playhead.
Every selected card the playhead sits inside becomes two independently editable cards. Selected cards the playhead is outside are left untouched, so you can sweep up a group and still cut only the ones crossing that moment. If the playhead isn’t inside any of them, Tella asks you to move it first. This works for media overlays, text, sound effects, blurs, and highlights. Video and audio on the right continue from the correct point in the source instead of restarting.

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Copy and paste groups

  1. Select the cards you want to copy.
  2. Press Cmd + C on Mac or Ctrl + C on Windows.
  3. Move the playhead to the destination and press Cmd + V or Ctrl + V.
Pasted cards keep their durations, relative spacing, layer order, and appearance. If the complete group would run past the end of the clip, Tella moves it earlier so every card fits.

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Reorder overlays with tracks

The vertical track order matches how visual overlays stack on the canvas: higher tracks appear in front of lower tracks.
  • Drag a visual overlay card up or down to move it between tracks.
  • Select one visual overlay card and press Arrow Up or Arrow Down to move it by one track.
  • Right-click an overlay on the canvas and choose Send to front or Send to back to move it directly to either end of the stack.
When a visual overlay card is selected in the timeline, plain vertical arrow keys reorder its track instead of moving it by one pixel on the canvas.
Track order only affects what appears in front on the canvas, so it applies to visual overlays — images, video, and text. Blurs, highlights, and sound effects are not reordered this way: dragging them between tracks or pressing the arrow keys on them has no effect. Blurs and highlights always apply to the recording beneath them, and sound effects are mixed together regardless of which track their card sits on — to balance those, use each sound effect’s own volume control.

Related topics

Overlays overviewAdd media overlaysHow to blur sensitive information or highlight information on the screenAdd text to your videoCan I combine two separate recordings into one video?