Using the Canvas Panel

The canvas panel is a video preview panel – spacial representation of the visual clips in your ScreenFlow project – which allows you to play your project, and size and organize the visual clips of your project.

Figure 16. Canvas Controls

The center black frame (which may be obscured by the frame of a video clip) in the canvas panel is the output frame rectangle that controls the size of your video when you export it. The gray space around the black frame is for placing content that will not be present (or fully present) in your exported video. Use this space to display off-screen content present in scaling or pan effects. The content displayed on the canvas reflects the position of the scrubber on the timeline.

If the clip is visual (video, image, and text), the upper track is displayed over the lower tracks.

The figure below depicts how the canvas looks before any recording has been performed to obscure the output frame rectangle:

Figure 17. Canvas Panel Without any Content in Project.