Steps, zooms & timing

Each click the AI found in your recording becomes a step. In the editor, steps are called hotspots. A step has a point on the screen, a time in the recording, and a title and description that appear together as the step card in the video. This page covers editing steps, zooms, and how the video is timed so the narration always matches the screen.

#Find your way around the editor

• Left rail: Hotspots, Script, Voice and Formats tabs. Steps are on Hotspots.
• Centre: the recording, with the active step's marker and card drawn over it.
• Below the preview: the timeline. Each step is a bar at its time in the recording. The waveform shows the recording's sound, and thin vertical lines mark where the screen changed.
• Right panel: the list of steps, and the fields for the one you've selected.

The preview plays your raw recording without sound. Once you've rendered, a Final video tab above the preview shows the finished MP4 with narration, zooms and cards.

#Check and edit a step

1. On the Hotspots tab, click a step in the list, or click its bar on the timeline. The preview jumps to it.
2. Edit the Title and Description. Together they make the step card in the video.

3. To move the marker, click the spot on the video where the click happened.

Edits save automatically.

If a step's wording is off, click Regenerate title & description and the AI rewrites that step from its frame. Step card text is separate from the narration script: after changing steps, regenerate the script or edit the matching lines. See Script & voice.

#Add or remove steps

• Add a step: move the playhead to the moment you want and click Add hotspot here under the preview. A step called "New hotspot" appears. Give it a title and description, and click the video to place its marker.
• Remove a step: click the bin icon next to it in the list.

If the steps are badly off, click Re-analyze under the preview to run detection again.

#Turn zoom on or off

By default, the finished video zooms and pans towards each step's marker while its card is on screen. To keep a step at full frame, select it and switch off Zoom in on this hotspot.

Zoom is usually right for small buttons and menus. Switch it off for steps where the whole screen matters, such as a dashboard loading or a page overview. Very short steps aren't zoomed.

#How timing works

Each step's card and narration line are timed to its click, so the card is always on the screen it describes.

• The card appears while the screen is up and ends at the click.
• If the narration line is longer than the time the screen was up before the click, the video pauses on the frame just before the click until the line finishes. Then the click happens and the video carries on.

So you can record at a natural pace. You don't have to wait on each screen while you record, and the narration never talks over the wrong screen.

#See where the video pauses

Once the script is written, pauses show up in the editor. They are estimated from the length of each line, then set exactly when you render.

• On the timeline, a small marker such as ❚❚ 2.4s sits where each pause happens.
• Next to the time readout, "+6.1s narration pauses" gives the total the pauses add to the video.
• When you play the preview, it stops at each pause and shows "Paused 2.4s for narration", then carries on, like the finished video does. Pressing play during a pause skips the rest of it.

To shorten a pause, shorten that step's narration line and re-render. Long pauses can feel stuck, and a line of one or two sentences usually fits.

#Retime a step by hand

You can change when a step's card appears:

• Drag its bar along the timeline, or drag the bar's right edge to make it longer or shorter.
• Or type new values in Time (s) and Duration (s).

Steps can't overlap; the editor keeps a small gap between neighbours.

#Why step times shift

When you write the script and again when you render, TurtleScene schedules every step against its narration and saves the result, so step times in the editor can shift slightly. That is the timing the finished video uses. Steps whose click falls inside a cut are left out of the video. See Trim & cut waits.

#Make a clickable demo from the same steps

Click Make interactive demo in the top bar to turn each step into a step of a clickable demo, with the narration script as its tooltips. See From a recording.