The Durable Layer: Timeline Intent and .recordly Projects

Recordly's scene can only be reproduced if its decisions survive beyond the current preview. This chapter focuses on that durable layer: how timeline and appearance settings describe editorial intent, how a .recordly project moves through saving and reopening, and why the project keeps media paths external instead of pretending to be a self-contained video bundle. The result is a practical way to judge what Recordly preserves, what it validates, and what happens when the source media is no longer where the project expects it.

A project describes a scene; it does not replace the media

The distinction between source media and project intent is easiest to see in a simple example. Suppose a recording contains a pointer moving across a dashboard. The source video holds the captured frames. The project can say that the first quiet portion should be trimmed, that the pointer's main action deserves a zoom, that the cursor should be smoothed, that a webcam bubble belongs in the lower corner, and that the finished frame should use a particular background and aspect ratio. None of those decisions requires a second screen capture. They are instructions for reconstructing a different presentation from the same evidence.

Recordly's project model stores that distinction explicitly. A project contains a source video path and an editor state. The editor state covers the major choices that determine the scene: zoom and trim regions, speed or clip changes, annotations, captions, audio regions, webcam settings, cursor settings, background and frame styling, aspect ratio, and export preferences. It also retains the information needed to interpret those choices consistently when the project is loaded again.

This makes the project declarative in a useful sense. It does not store a finished frame for every moment. It stores the decisions from which those frames can be derived. A project can therefore remain small relative to its source video, and a creator can revise a zoom or remove an annotation without rebuilding the recording. The trade-off is that the project depends on the media it names. The .recordly file is not a portable container that automatically carries every video, webcam, and audio asset with it.

That dependency is not a flaw hidden by the format. It is part of the product's local-first design. Source files may be large, may live in a user-selected recordings directory, and may be reused by more than one project. Keeping paths external avoids duplicating them, but it makes path validation and project identity part of ordinary editing rather than optional security plumbing.

How timeline intent becomes durable state

The timeline is where a creator turns a recording into a sequence of viewing decisions. A trim removes a range from the output. A clip region can preserve a range and associate it with a speed or mute choice. A zoom region gives the camera a time interval and a focus. An annotation or caption is active only within its own interval. Audio regions add independent material. Appearance settings determine how the scene surrounding the recorded content is framed, while cursor and webcam settings determine how supporting layers move with it.

These choices are related even when the editor presents them in different controls. A speed change changes the relationship between source time and timeline time. That affects when a background video or webcam should be sampled, how long a zoom should remain visible, and where a cursor sample belongs in the output. A crop changes the visible coordinate system, which affects both camera focus and cursor projection. A zoom-reactive webcam setting ties overlay scale to the camera transform. The project model is valuable because it keeps these decisions available to the same renderer rather than reducing each control to an isolated visual patch.

Recordly normalizes this state when it loads it.