Preferences
Preferences hold your own defaults: the units the editor shows, the rulers, and what a new blank project starts with. Set them once and every project you start uses them.
Open Preferences
Do one of these:
- Choose Menu › Preferences….
- Press ⌘ , on a Mac, or Ctrl , on Windows.
- Signed in, open your account and click Preferences.
Press Esc or click outside the window to close it. Every change takes effect as you make it.
How you see the editor
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Lengths in | Shows positions, sizes and other lengths in Pixels (px) on the artboard, or in the scene's own Scene units (u). Only the display changes. |
| Text size in | The unit the text Size field shows: px, pt, rem, em or u. |
| Rulers | Turns the rulers on or off, and sets how strongly they draw: 40, 60, 80 or 100%. |
| Scrubbing | Hear sound plays short pieces of the mix as you drag the playhead. Off until you turn it on. |
| Editor | Simple shows the tools most people need. Full shows everything. |
| Floating panels | Dock all panels puts every panel you dragged out back in its place. |
These are the same settings you can change in passing: the unit beside a field, View › Rulers, View › Simple or Full. Changing one in either place changes it in both.
New projects
These apply when you start a blank project: Menu › New project, New file on the home page, or a sentence typed on the home page.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Size | The artboard's shape: Widescreen, Square, Portrait, Vertical, the App Store sizes, or Custom with your own width and height in pixels. |
| Frame rate | From 10 to 120 fps. |
| Length | How long the timeline is, in seconds. Leave it empty for 8 seconds. |
| Background | The scene's background color. |
| Colors | How the scene turns light into screen colors. Filmic (ACES) rolls bright light off as film does, so a lit scene holds together but white shows as a light gray; None · exact colors shows pictures, screenshots and colors exactly as they are. AgX and Neutral sit between. Each project can change it under Scene › Environment › Tone mapping. See Tone mapping. |
| Snap to guides and grid | Whether layers snap to guides and grids from the start. |
| Ripple chapters | Whether dragging a chapter's end moves what comes after it. Each project can change it in the timeline's Chapters menu. See Lengthen or shorten a chapter. |
| Image format | PNG or JPG for Export image. |
| Export scale | How large every export is, from 0.5× to 4× the canvas size. |
| Video format | MP4, WebM, GIF or a PNG sequence for Export video. |
A setting you leave alone uses Paraplex's own default. Click Reset beside the heading to put them all back.
Note: A template brings its own settings, so these don't apply to it. The project you have open keeps what it has. If you start a new file in a shape you picked, such as New file › Square, that shape wins over your default size.
Where they're kept
Signed out, your preferences stay in this browser.
Signed in, they're also kept on your account, so they follow you to another computer. If you changed them on two computers, the most recent change wins.