Clip layouts and storytelling: entry, management, exit

On this page

1. What a layout is, and is not
2. The elements
3. Act one: the entry
4. Act two: management
5. Act three: the exit
6. Region elements: pointing at the detail
7. Putting a layout together

Every trade is a three-act story. There is a moment you commit, a stretch where you manage what you committed to, and a moment you are out. A raw recording contains all three, but it does not point at them. Layouts are how TradeClip points. This post explains what a layout is, what the pieces are, and how to arrange them so a viewer, including you six months from now, can follow the story.

What a layout is, and is not#

A layout describes how a recorded trade is composed at render time. The raw chart recording is never altered; the same trade can be exported through any number of layouts afterwards, and changing a layout never touches the source. That separation is deliberate. The recording is evidence. The layout is presentation.

Layouts exist on three canvases, Desktop 16:9, Mobile 9:16 and Square 1:1, each with a shipped starter. Canvas sizes, labels, the editor's tabs, the store's validation and the region picker's presets are all driven off one table, so the three shapes behave identically apart from their proportions.

The starters are overlay designs. The chart fills the frame and the other elements float on top of it. An earlier banded design placed the readouts in bars above and below the chart, and it left a black slab wherever the recording could not fill a band; the overlay approach uses the whole canvas for the thing that matters.

The elements#

A layout is a set of elements, each with a rectangle expressed as fractions of the canvas so the design is resolution-independent. The element kinds are:

• Chart: the recorded TradingView window, framed by the capture region.
• Webcam: the recorded camera, when one was captured with the clip.
• Symbol, side and quantity: the facts the detector read at entry.
• Unrealized P&L: the profit or loss as it moved through the trade, animated from the recorded samples.
• Final P&L: the last value that was visible before the position closed.
• Take profit and stop loss: the clip's recorded levels.
• Elapsed: time since entry, counting up as the clip plays.
• Text: anything you type, including caption variables.

Every value element follows the rule that runs through the whole app: it shows what was observed, or it shows an em dash. There is no default price and no estimated P&L.

Act one: the entry#

The entry is the point at which the clip should establish its facts. In the starter layouts the symbol, side and quantity sit together near the top so the viewer knows what they are looking at before anything moves. If you are adding your own text row, the entry is where a single line of context earns its place: the setup name, or the level you were watching.

The markers help here. When a trade ends, the clip carries markers for setup, entry, add, partial, danger and exit, placed from the detector's confirmed events. In the source timeline editor you can scrub straight to the entry marker, and if you recorded in rolling mode the setup before the entry is in the clip too, which is often the most useful part of act one.

What to leave out: the fill price, unless the chart displayed it. The detector reads the position label, and the label shows size and profit or loss, not the fill.

Act two: management#

This is the act most recaps skip and the one that separates a highlight from a record. Two elements carry it.

Unrealized P&L is the readout that makes the middle of a trade legible. It is drawn from the recorded P&L timeline, a sequence of samples stamped in source seconds while the trade was open. Because the samples are mapped onto the exported timeline before they are drawn, they stay in step with the chart whatever the edit does: if you speed up a ten-minute hold, the readout changes at the instants the values changed, compressed the same way the video was.

Elapsed turns the abstract hold into a number a viewer can feel. "Twelve minutes" means more than a stretch of sped-up candles.

For your own review, act two is where the decisions you did not plan show up: the add that was not in the plan, the partial that was taken because the readout turned red. In the recording those are visible as what they were.

A limitation worth knowing: TradeClip records confirmed take-profit and stop-loss changes during a trade, but nothing draws that timeline onto a clip yet. The {tp} and {sl} variables render the clip's single static levels. A stop you moved mid-trade is on disk and visible in the recording of your screen, but the overlay will not annotate the move.

Act three: the exit#

The exit is confirmed by the detector only after the chart has stayed flat, not on the first flat reading, and the clip is dated to the moment flat was first seen. So the exit marker lands where the position actually closed, and the post-roll shows what the chart did next.

The final P&L element is the natural closing card. It shows the last value that was visible before the close. If you use a caption instead, {pnl} gives the same fact as text. Note that these two paths format slightly differently today: the layout element assumes a currency for its readout while the caption resolver shows the number as the chart showed it; that inconsistency is listed in the app's known defects, and the caption is the one that never assumes.

Region elements: pointing at the detail#

Sometimes the story is in a small part of the screen: the P&L strip, a level line, an order ticket. Region elements let you drag a rectangle over the composed recording and place those pixels, enlarged, on their own timeline row. The crop and the placed rectangle are independent, so you can move and resize the readout without changing what it samples, and the region follows the main video's source instant through cuts, speed changes and reordering.

Two current limits: region elements are drawn by the built-in and template exports but omitted from "Export with layout" (the editor adds a warning rather than claiming they were included), and an enlarged region taken from an already-scaled canvas can be softer than a direct crop of the recording.

Putting a layout together#

1. Choose the canvas for the destination: 16:9 for a narrated recap, 9:16 for a short, 1:1 when in doubt.
2. Set the capture region first. Keep the last candles and the position line in frame. The region is stamped on the clip, so later exports match.
3. Start from the starter. It already puts symbol, side and size at the top and the P&L and timer where they read; on the trial and Pro plans the TradeClip watermark is added at render time near the edge of the frame.
4. Add one text row, at most two. Use variables so the text is filled from the recording. A caption containing {upnl} or {elapsed} becomes a subtitle track with one cue per real change, taken from the recorded timeline.
5. Cut for the three acts. Keep entry and exit at real speed; compress the middle; never cut around the drawdown.
6. Export and watch it once. Check the framing shows what you intend.

The best layouts are quiet. The chart is the story; the elements are the captions that let a viewer follow it.