What applies everywhere, and what only starts a project off.
Most settings apply globally.
Two settings apply only to new projects: Default audio to text alignment quality and Default timeline resize behaviour. They set a project's starting value. After that the project owns the choice, and changing the preference leaves existing projects alone.
And one preference is not in this window at all. Audible Scrubbing is on the View menu, because it is something you switch on and off while working rather than a default to set once. It applies to every project. More on scrubbing.
Auto, Light or Dark. Auto follows the system.
How much the playhead tells you about the item you are on — nothing, its number, how far in you are, or that plus its total length. Pressing T in a project cycles through the same four levels and updates this preference as it goes, so the last one you used is the one new windows open with. More on the readout.
From 10 MB to 1 GB. Editing leaves orphaned files behind so undo can still work. ClapperBoard checks shortly after a project opens and every so often while it stays open, and offers to clear them once they pass this size. Raise it if you would rather not be asked; lower it if disk space is tight. Compacting also empties the project’s set-aside folder of anything more than a week old. More on compacting.
Two separate switches that widen the grabbable area around a rectangle's edges and corners, without changing the rectangle itself. Worth turning on if you find edges fiddly to catch, particularly on small crops. More on cropping.
On, a waveform is drawn mirrored about the middle of its lane, the shape below the centre line repeating the one above it. Off, only the upper half is drawn, standing on the lane's bottom edge — and since the reflection was half of what the lane was showing, the audio lanes themselves grow shorter, giving the height back to the preview above them. Mirrored is the familiar shape and the easier one to read at a glance; unmirrored is worth having in a project with several audio lanes, where the timeline is competing with the page for the window. More on audio lanes.
What a new project starts with when matching a narration to its pages: the thorough comparison, or one of the faster settings that trade a little accuracy for speed. It can be changed inside the sync itself at any time. More on syncing to audio.
Whether a new project starts in cascading resize, where changing an item's duration slides everything after it along, or absorbing, where the next item takes up the change and nothing beyond it moves. Switchable per project from the toolbar. More on resize behaviour.
Shows whether exports are currently watermarked and capped, with a button to upgrade if they are, and Restore Purchases for something bought previously or on another Mac. Subscribers get a link through to managing the subscription, and the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy are here too. More on the free tier.
Plenty of choices are not here, because they belong to the project and travel with it. If you are looking for something and cannot find it in Settings, it is probably one of these:
| Setting | Where it is |
|---|---|
| Resolution, frame rate, format, seek precision, canvas colour | Render options, in the toolbar beside Export |
| Stop-motion, onion skinning, frame length | Render options › Stop-motion |
| Timeline mode and zoom | The controls bar |
| Lane names, levels and mutes | The lane controls, down the left of the timeline |
| Options for the detection tools | Each tool's own sheet — remembered per project |