The preview is where you see a GreenLight Motion film for the first time as a film, and where you change it yourself before it is rendered. It is a card in the pipeline’s Preview lane: a player with a timeline, and a side panel with Scenes, Elements and Design. You can click anything in any scene to change its words, colour, size, picture or position, type over words in place, and change the film’s colours and font in one place. Every change goes into the render and every export.
Use the preview on the canvas
Like other HTML cards, the preview card is a still picture of its page until you start using it:
- Click the preview card to select it. A hint at the bottom of the card reads Double-click to play and edit.
- Double-click the card. It gets an accent outline, and your clicks and keys then go to the film: Play, the timeline, the panels, clicking elements and typing.
- To hand control back to the canvas, press Esc or click anywhere outside the card. If an element in the film is selected, the first Esc clears that selection and the next one leaves the card.
The layout
- The stage — the film at the centre, scaled to fit.
- The top bar — the film’s name, its size, frame rate, length and number of frames, where it runs (“On the board” and the board’s name), your changes, and a line saying what happens next: “Approve it in the chat, and the agent renders and exports it”.
- The transport — play and step controls, the time, and the playback speed.
- The timeline — a filmstrip with a still of every scene and its length, a seconds ruler above it, and the voice-over lane below with a tick for every sound effect. One playhead runs through all of them.
- The side panel — Scenes, Elements and Design.
Hide panels (the icon beside the tabs, or F) hides the side panel and the timeline so the film fills the card; play, the time and a thin scrub line stay. Show panels in the top bar, F or Esc brings them back.
Play and scrub
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Play (Space) | Plays or pauses the film. |
| Previous frame / Next frame (← / →) | Steps one frame. Hold Shift to step one second. |
| 0.5× / 1× / 2× | Playback speed. |
| Loop | Plays the film again from the start when it ends (on by default). |
| Voice / Sound | Mutes or unmutes the film’s sound. It appears once the film has a recorded voice-over or sound effects, and reads Sound when there are sound effects. |
| Timeline | Click or drag to scrub. Double-click a scene to jump to its start. Home and End jump to the start and end of the film. |
Scenes
The Scenes tab lists every scene with its still, number, title and start time, its length, whether it cuts or fades in, what kind of scene it is, and its voice-over line. The list follows playback; click a scene to jump to it.
The top of the list gives the number of scenes and the film’s length, and the state of the voice-over: the number of recorded clips, Voice-over · written, not recorded when the lines exist but aren’t recorded yet, or No voice-over.
Change an element
Click anything in any scene. The film pauses, the element is selected, and the Elements tab shows everything it has. The header names the element, what kind it is and its scene, with a trail of the groups it sits in (click one to select the group instead).
| Element | Options |
|---|---|
| Text | Text (its words), Colour, Size, Weight (Thin to Black), Case (As typed or UPPER), Tracking, Italic |
| Picture | Picture (Replace… opens a file picker for your own image), Corners |
| Shape | Fill and Corners, or Fill and Stroke for icons and drawn shapes |
| Any element (under Position and visibility) | Move X, Move Y, Scale, Rotate, Hidden |
If the agent set up a panel for the element (for example “Button” or “$0 sticker”), it appears at the top with the settings the agent thought worth changing.
Other ways to change an element:
- Drag it on the stage to move it.
- Double-click its words on the stage to type over them in place. Enter keeps the new words; Esc puts the old ones back.
- Number fields — type a value, or drag the arrows beside the field: hold Shift for steps ten times larger, Alt for steps ten times smaller.
- Colours — click a colour to open the picker: a colour field, hue and opacity, a hex field, Pick from the screen, and the film’s own colours. Choosing one of the film’s colours keeps the element linked to it, so it follows when that colour changes in the Design tab.
Press Esc or the close button in the element’s header to deselect it; Space plays on.
When nothing is selected, the Elements tab shows what is on screen at the playhead:
- On screen now — the panels the agent set up for the elements in view, named in the film’s own words. Use the target button on a panel to select its element in the film.
- Effects — each scene’s own settings, such as a blur’s strength or an optional sticker.
The Design tab
The Design tab changes the whole film at once, in every scene:
- Film — Theme (Light or Dark), the Background (when the film has one) and the Accent.
- Colours — every colour the film uses, by name (Canvas, Surface, Text, Secondary text, Accent and so on, plus any colours of the film’s own). Change one and everything that uses it follows. Library colours lists colours set inside the library scenes, with how many times each is used.
- Type — the film’s Font, with a specimen of every weight and size the film uses. The list has 15 fonts, from Helvetica Neue (the library’s own type), Inter, Geist, Manrope, DM Sans and Fraunces to display faces for brand-new films: Space Grotesk, Bricolage Grotesque, Syne, Unbounded, Sora, Outfit, Archivo, Instrument Sans and Playfair Display.
Words fitted to the old font may need adjusting with a new one; the agent looks at stills of the film and re-fits what broke before it renders.
Your changes
- The green dot — every field you changed shows a green dot beside its label. Click it to go back to the agent’s value.
- The changes button in the top bar reads No changes or the number of changes. It opens Your changes: every change as a row with what it was and what it is now, and a Revert button for each.
- Undo and Redo — ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z (Ctrl+Z and Shift+Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux), or the buttons at the top of Your changes.
- Reset all removes every change.
- Copy for the agent copies your changes as text to paste into a chat.
On a board, your changes are saved on the preview card as you make them (“Saved to the film on the board”), so they are still there when you reload the board. The preview page itself never changes: the agent’s film stays as it was, with your changes on top.
Approve the preview
When you are happy with the film, approve it in the agent’s chat. The top bar reminds you: “Your 3 changes are saved. Approve it in the chat, and the agent renders with them”. The agent reads your changes, says in one line what it will keep, records the voice-over and adds sound effects if the film has them, then renders and exports.
Your changes go into the render, the Video Editor project and the After Effects package, including the font: the Video Editor loads it by name, and After Effects needs it installed.
If you later ask the agent to change something you already edited, it changes your edit rather than the value underneath, so what you see in the preview is what gets rendered.
Open the preview in your browser
Like every HTML card, the preview card’s toolbar has Edit, Export and Open. Open opens the preview page in your web browser, for a bigger view on another screen. A preview opened this way reads Opened from disk in its top bar: it plays, but changes you make there are kept in that browser only and don’t reach the film. Make the changes you want rendered in the card on the canvas.
Where to go next
- The Film Pipeline on Your Board — where the preview sits and what comes after it
- Voice-Over and Sound Effects — what you hear in the preview, and how it is recorded
- Rendering and Exports — what the agent makes after you approve
- Previewing HTML, Markdown, and PDF — other HTML cards on the canvas
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