Template Editor: See Your Overlays on a Real Video Before You Apply Them
The overlay template editor now previews your template on a video from your library, shows each overlay's timing on the timeline, and flags a second base media before it doubles your audio.
What's New
An overlay template is designed before anyone knows which video it will play over. That made two things hard: seeing whether "show this in the last 15 seconds" actually lands where you want, and noticing when a template has picked up a mistake, such as two copies of the base media. Both are fixed in this update.
Preview on a real video. Pick any video from your library and the editor shows the template applied to it, at its real length, with its real audio.
A timeline that tells the truth. Every overlay is drawn where its "When to show" setting puts it. Drag a bar to change the timing.
A visible base media. The base media is translucent so the layers under it stay visible, and a second copy is marked in red on the canvas and on the timeline.
Preview on a Real Video
Open the template editor and look at the timeline header. It reads Preview as 2 minutes: the template is being previewed as if applied to a two-minute item. Change that to 30 seconds, 10 minutes, or 1 hour to see how your timing behaves on different lengths.
Or skip the guess. Choose Choose a video... from the same menu, pick a video from your library, and the template is previewed on that file. The base media plays the real footage, the timeline takes the video's real length, and an overlay set to "During the outro" sits at the true end.
You can also start from the base media itself: select it and use Preview with a video in the side panel, or double-click it on the canvas.
The preview video is never saved with the template. It only changes what you see while editing, and the link in your address bar remembers it, so a reload or a shared link opens the same preview.
Timing You Can See and Drag
Each overlay in a template has a When to show setting: throughout the entire video, during the intro, during the outro, at a specific time, or periodically. The timeline now draws each overlay from that setting:
An intro overlay hugs the start, an outro overlay hugs the end.
A "throughout" overlay spans the whole item.
A periodic overlay shows its repeating windows.
Drag the free edge of a bar to change the timing. The end of an intro sets how long the intro lasts; the start of an outro sets how long the outro lasts. Edges that follow the video itself (the start of an intro, the end of an outro) are locked, because moving them could not mean anything.
When you change "When to show", the playhead jumps to where the overlay now appears, so you always see what you just chose.
Base Media You Can Trust
The base media placeholder used to be an opaque box that hid every layer beneath it and looked the same whether there was one or two. Now it is a translucent stage with its timing in the label ("Base media · whole item"), and:
Any second copy is drawn in red with a badge: 2nd base media · same item, audio muted at render.
The timeline marks the same copy with a red Second base media warning.
The base media panel says plainly what a second copy does and mutes its audio at render time, so a duplicate can no longer double the sound of a video.
If you want a picture-in-picture layout with the same video twice, that still works. You will just see it clearly.
Why It Matters
Templates run over videos of every length. A ten-second preview cannot tell you whether a sponsor card lands at the right moment in a two-hour archive. Previewing on the real video does, and the timeline shows the same answer without scrubbing.
For the full walkthrough see Timing Overlays in a Template.