Timing and motion
Pauses
Freeze the chart on a candle to give the viewer time to read it — and the extra holds narration adds for you.
A pause freezes the reveal on a candle for a number of seconds. It is the single most effective tool in the app for making a video comprehensible, and the most under-used.
Press h (for hold — p is Position) and click a candle.
Why they matter
A chart revealing at a readable tempo is still too fast to think about. Every point you want a viewer to actually take in needs a moment where nothing moves: the breakout candle, the retest, the moment before the answer.
The marker
A dashed line across the plot with a ⏸ 3s pill. Both the line and the pill are grabbable —
drag sideways to move the pause to a different candle.
The marker is the most in-the-way thing on the canvas while you are drawing under it, so it has its own eye in the Visible list. Hiding it hides the marker, never the pause: the hold still happens, the playhead still freezes, the duration still counts.
Narration adds its own
If the project has narration, the holds it needs to fit the speech are added on top of yours automatically, taking whichever is longer where they overlap. You only place the pauses you want on purpose.
These are derived on every read, never stored — so changing the candle tempo recomputes them instead of leaving the video padded for a speed it no longer runs at.
A live recording adds none
A recorded take produces no automatic holds at all. You already spoke to a video playing at this tempo; deriving holds afterwards would stretch the picture out from under your own voice. See recording.
Nothing can be placed inside a pause by column
For the whole span of a freeze the playhead sits on one column. An element anchored to that column has one moment, not three seconds of them.
To sequence things inside a pause, use offset seconds or a narration anchor — see how timing works.
The end hold
Tail seconds in Settings → Output holds the finished chart at the end. It is not a pause and has no marker; it is simply extra video after the last candle.
Every platform benefits from one. A video that cuts the instant the last candle lands gives the viewer no time to look at the thing you spent forty seconds building.
No list row on the canvas
A pause has no id — it is keyed by the candle it sits after — so it never appears in the element list and cannot be selected like an element. The list view is the Pauses section in the Motion panel, where every pause shows its own length.