OnDeck Help

1. Overview

OnDeck is a planning and communication workspace for media projects. It turns footage into clear, shareable direction: pull the frames that matter onto an infinite board, arrange them into references and comparisons, mark them up with what needs to change — and give your team notes they can act on without guesswork.

Who it's for

OnDeck fits anywhere a team has to point at exactly the right frame and agree on what to do with it — a creative director framing a look, a colorist building grade references, compositors and VFX artists breaking down a shot, 3D artists and motion designers collecting direction, and editors assembling review notes.

How teams use it

• Build reference and look boards from real frames, not a folder of scattered screenshots.
• Break a sequence into the shots and moments that need attention.
• Compare takes, versions, or grades side by side to make a call.
• Annotate frames with the intent — what to change and why — then share the board.

Direction that's never ambiguous

Every frame you capture stays linked to its exact source — the precise file and frame it came from. Double-click any capture and the player lands on that frame, so a note never means "somewhere around 00:42." That exactness is what makes an OnDeck board trustworthy as direction: your team works from the frame you meant, every time.

2. Getting started

Here's the shape of an OnDeck session, start to finish:

1. Open a clip or image sequence (File ▸ Open…). You start in a compact player.
2. Find a frame worth flagging and press C to capture it to the board.
3. Expand to the board, then arrange, crop, group, and annotate your captures.
4. Double-click any capture to jump the player back to its exact source frame.
5. Save the board as a project, or export stills, a contact sheet, or a PDF to share.

Where your settings live

Preferences are stored in your user profile at %LOCALAPPDATA%\OnDeck, kept separate from the application itself.

3. Opening media

Open media from the File menu, or drag a file or folder onto the window.

Supported formats

Video is decoded in-process by FFmpeg — H.264 and other common formats, plus professional codecs including ProRes (with ProRes 4444 alpha) and DNxHR / DNxHD. Image sequences support PNG, JPEG, and EXR (including alpha).

The image-sequence dialog

Open a folder — or any single numbered frame — and OnDeck detects the whole sequence and shows a dialog before it opens. You can review and set:

• Detected range — the first and last frame numbers, and how many are actually present.
• Missing / duplicate frames — gaps in the numbering, or duplicates from mixed padding.
• Frame rate — the playback rate for the sequence (default 24).
• Gap behaviour — how to treat missing frames: skip, hold the previous frame, or fill with black, transparent, or an error.

4. The player window

OnDeck's window adapts to how you're working, from a tiny always-on-top player to a full board workspace.

The diagonal expansion handle

The signature handle sits in the anchored lower corner of the player. Click it to expand or collapse, double-click to fit the screen, or drag it to live-resize. The View menu switches mode and anchor corner directly.

Zoom, always-on-top & fullscreen

• Playback zoom (View menu) — Fit window, 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 %, or a custom percentage.
• Always on top (View menu) — keeps OnDeck above other windows for reference while you work.
• Fullscreen presentation — Ctrl+F or F11; Esc exits.

5. Transport & playback

The transport strip below the viewport (and the keyboard) drives playback.

Play, step & shuttle

• Play / pause — Space.
• Step one frame — ← / →.
• J-K-L shuttle — L plays forward and speeds up each press (1×, 2×, 4×…), J shuttles in reverse, K pauses.
• Jumps — Shift+← / Shift+→ jump by the configured step; Home / End go to the first / last frame.

Ranges & looping

• Mark in / out to set a play range; clear it to play the whole clip. The range shows as a red span above the scrubber.
• Loop repeats the range; ping-pong bounces forward and back.
• Variable rate — play faster or slower; the readout shows fractional rates.

Time display & go-to

The time readout cycles between frames, timecode, and seconds. A CALC badge marks a timecode that OnDeck calculated from the frame rate rather than read from the file. Type a frame number or timecode to jump straight to it (frame entry is 1-based to match the counter).

6. Precise navigation

Because every reference you share points back to a specific frame, OnDeck is exact about which frame that is. The frame it shows for a given number is the frame at that presentation position — never inferred from nominal frame rate, and correct forward and backward, on constant- and variable-rate footage alike. So when your team lands on a note, they land on the frame you meant.

Scrubbing

Drag the scrubber to move through the clip; a floating timecode label follows the playhead. On long-GOP codecs (H.264/H.265) a scrub snaps to the nearest keyframe while you drag, so scrubbing stays responsive, then lands exactly when you release.

Under the hood

• A frame index is built lazily in the background the first time you open a clip, and cached to disk so re-opening is instant. Frame 0 shows before any scan.
• A decoded-frame cache keeps recently seen frames in memory, so stepping back or revisiting a frame is instant — no re-decode.

7. Audio

OnDeck plays the clip's first audio stream, kept in sync with the picture. Mute with M or the transport button, and set volume with the slider.

How sync works

During normal 1× forward playback, audio is the master clock and the picture follows it, for rock-solid lip sync. Every other mode — reverse, shuttle, high speed, looping a range, or muted — switches to a monotonic clock and silences audio, so scrubbing and shuttling stay precise.

8. The reference board

The board is an infinite canvas that holds the frames you capture. Pan, zoom, and arrange as much as you like — a world-space grid keeps you oriented at any scale.

Capturing a frame

Press C (or use the capture control) to drop the current frame onto the board as a linked reference. The capture stores the source file and the exact frame number — not the pixels — and its thumbnail is decoded off-thread from the source. That keeps projects small and the link exact.

Return to source — the magic moment

Double-click any capture and the player jumps to that exact source frame — re-opening the source first if it isn't already loaded. This is the round trip OnDeck is built around.

9. Selecting & transforming

Selecting

• Click an item to select it; Shift+click to add or remove.
• Left-drag on empty canvas draws a marquee.
• Ctrl+A selects all; Esc clears the selection.

Transforming

Selected captures carry handles for the full set of transforms, all undoable:

• Move, scale (corner handles), and rotate (rotation knob). Hold Shift while rotating to snap to 45° steps.
• Crop — Shift+C enters crop mode with eight handles; Enter commits. The crop is content-anchored and rides along with later transforms.
• Reset Crop and Reset Transform restore a capture to full-frame or un-rotated.

Grouping

10. Arrange tools

The Arrange menu tidies a multi-item selection. Every action is undoable, and treats a group, stack, or island as a single rigid unit.

Smart guides & snapping

While you drag, OnDeck shows magenta guide lines and snaps the selection's edges and centres to nearby items. Hold Alt to disable snapping for a move. A separate Snap to grid option (with a grid-scale slider in the corner) aligns items to a fixed grid.

11. Annotation tools

The Tools menu holds a full markup set. Markup attached to a frame is stored in the frame's own coordinates, so it follows the capture through move, scale, crop, and rotate — and stays clipped to the crop.

Transform handles & style

Every annotation can be moved, scaled, rotated, stretched per-axis, and has a movable pivot. Hold Shift while rotating to constrain to 45°. A style panel sets colour, opacity, line width, and size.

Spell-check

Text annotations are spell-checked against your Windows language and personal dictionary. Misspellings get a red underline; right-click for corrections, Add to dictionary, or Ignore. Toggle it in Preferences.

12. Copy, cut & paste

Copy board objects with Ctrl+C, cut with Ctrl+X, and paste with Ctrl+V — all also on the Edit menu and the right-click board menu.

• Annotations attached to a copied frame travel with it.
• Pasted copies land selected and slightly offset; repeated pastes cascade.
• Copy and paste are one undoable step each; cut copies then deletes.

13. Visual comparison

Put two shots against each other to spot differences.

Onion skin, cut-match & freeze

• Onion skin ghosts neighbouring frames over the current one — useful for motion and continuity.
• Cut-match lines up two points across a cut.
• Freeze A / Freeze B holds one stream still while you scrub the other.

14. Markers & playlists

Markers

• Press * to drop a marker at the playhead, and give it a name.
• Markers appear as ticks on the scrubber; double-click one to jump to it.
• Markers are written to a CSV sidecar alongside your media automatically.
• The Markers palette (View menu) lists them all, with a Capture all markers to board button that drops a source-linked capture for every marker in one undoable step.

Playlists

The Playlist palette (View menu) plays a set of clips in sequence. Drag files in to add them, drag the dotted handles to reorder, and mark items to skip. Bypassed items are skipped on playback.

15. Print pages & export

Print pages

Drop print pages onto the board to lay captures out at a true physical size (Letter, A4, and other presets). Objects on a page move with it, and multiple pages can be organised into pagination groups.

Exporting

Stills export to PNG (8- or 16-bit) or EXR (scene-linear). Straight-alpha is preserved throughout — a transparent pixel exports as transparent, with no fringing. Output resolution and the sequence-naming template are set in Preferences, and long exports show progress with a Cancel.

16. Projects & recovery

File ▸ Save / Open Project stores your board as a single .ondk file. It records each capture's source path and frame number — not the video pixels — so projects stay small and reopen with placement, crops, and annotations intact. On open, thumbnails re-decode from the sources.

Autosave & crash recovery

OnDeck continuously autosaves your work to a separate recovery file — it never overwrites your explicit .ondk save. If the app closes unexpectedly, the next launch offers to restore. When a saved project exists, a comparison dialog lets you choose between the recovered work and the last saved version.

Relinking moved media

If a source file has moved, OnDeck flags it and offers a relink — scan a folder for the missing files and review the matches (with offline preview thumbnails) before re-pointing the captures.

17. Media Inspector

Open View ▸ Media Inspector for the full technical read-out of the current clip: codec, profile and level, dimensions, pixel aspect, frame rate (with a variable-rate flag), bit depth, chroma, colour primaries / transfer / matrix, alpha, audio stream details, file size, and source timecode. A Live section shows the current frame, timecode, and cache statistics as you play.

18. Preferences & performance

Open File ▸ Preferences… for startup, playback, viewer, colour, cache, autosave, window, and diagnostics settings. Your window layout (mode, anchor, size) and always-on-top state are remembered across restarts.

Decode mode

OnDeck defaults to hardware decode (D3D11VA) for smooth playback of heavy footage. If you need guaranteed exactness on a tricky file, switch to frame-accurate decode in Preferences; a software fallback is always available if hardware decode isn't supported.

Colour

The viewer composites in linear light and applies a display transform on the way out. You can load a .cube LUT per clip; it's applied to the viewport and baked into exports so what you see is what you get. EXR sequences are read as scene-linear and converted for display.

Cache

The decoded-frame cache and on-disk frame index sizes adapt to your RAM by default, and can be tuned in Preferences. Both live under your local app-data folder, never in the app directory.

19. Mouse & keyboard reference

Transport

Board & tools

View

20. Support & contact

Stuck, found a bug, or want something OnDeck doesn't do yet? Email us — a real person reads it, and we usually reply within two business days.

hello@ctrlcolab.com

To get a useful answer fastest, it helps to include:

• your OnDeck version (Help ▸ About) and your operating system;
• the file format you were working with — codec and container, which the Media Inspector (View ▸ Media Inspector) will tell you;
• what you expected to happen and what happened instead. Help ▸ Bug Report assembles a diagnostic summary for you, and you can redact file paths from it first in Preferences ▸ Diagnostics.

Lost your license?

Email us from the address you bought with and we will reissue it. Your license is verified entirely on your own computer, so we can regenerate the identical file at any time.

Refunds

OnDeck has no trial version — instead there is a 14-day money-back guarantee. If it isn't right for you, email us within 14 days and we will refund you in full, no reason required.

Legal

• End User License Agreement
• Privacy Policy — what OnDeck does and doesn't collect (short version: nothing)
• Refund Policy