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Short Cuts #14: Time Travel Through your Edit with Milestones

By David Winter
Jun 5, 2023
2 minute read

Time Travel with Milestones

Have you ever wished you could go back in time on an edit? Maybe you're not happy with the current direction, or perhaps you want to quickly and easily compare the old version against your current one.

Well, you can sell off your TARDIS, put your Pym particles in the bin, and tell the ghost of edits past to do one because we have a much more efficient method for you to time travel through your edit!

What are Milestones?

Milestiles are an automatic saving procedure inside Lightworks. For every ten editing actions you take, Lightworks create a milestone. It can store up to ten milestones before it starts overwriting the oldest ones.

However, there is a way you can bring these milestones directly into Lightworks and have them be accessible as sequences. This means not only can you access your previous editing version whenever you want, but you can also get around the ten milestone limit.

I'm Sold! Take Me Back!

Breaking through the limit is a straightforward one to do. Right-click in your playback preview screen, go to make, and choose 'Bin from Milestones'. That's going to automatically open up a bin filled with sequences created from the current ten milestones that Lightworks has stored for you.

To open a sequence, you double click on it. This action will open up your timeline how it was back at the point when you created that milestone. If you want to come back to the present, click on your main sequence that contains your current edits. It's as simple as that!

Infinite Possibilities

As I said before, Lightworks only stores ten milestones at a time. Milestones turned into sequences don't get deleted, however, so by performing this task every 100 edit actions or so, you can create a permanently accessible sequence from the milestone. There's no limit to how many you can make, so the sky is the limit here.

More Short Cuts

If you've found this guide useful and are looking for some other cool things you can do inside Lightworks, you can find all of our previous Short Cuts episodes here:

Short Cuts #13: Restore Deleted Footage or Sequences

Short Cuts #12: Get Creative with the Rolling Title Effect in Lightworks

Short Cuts #11: Editing Video for Social Media in the Correct Aspect Ratio

Short Cuts #10: Speed Up Editing with Proxies

Short Cuts #8 & 9: Save Time Rendering Video

Short Cuts #6: The Key to Keyframes in Lightworks

Short Cuts #5: How to Backup and Restore Video Edits in Lightworks

Short Cuts #4: How to use LUTs (and 5 free horror movie LUTs to download)

Short Cuts #3: How to do Picture in Picture in Lightworks

Short Cuts #2: Cloud Editing: Get Footage from Your Phone to Lightworks. Fast

Short Cuts #1.: Making a Freeze Frame in Lightworks