Welcome to Evidentiary

Getting Started

Everything below assumes an empty screen and no case yet. There are two ways through: run the interactive tour on sample data, or follow the written walkthrough on your own files. Both land in the same place — evidence on a jury display, under your control.

### Start the interactive tour

The fastest start is the interactive tour. Click Try the Sample Case on the welcome screen and, on your first run, Evidentiary walks you through the core courtroom loop on pre-populated data. Help → Start Interactive Tour re-runs it any time a case is open.

The sample case is Acme v. Apex Industries — exhibits P-1 "Contract (signed)", P-2 "Damages Chart", and P-3 "Incident Photo", a deposition of Sarah Apex with a matching transcript, and a binder called "Cross-Exam of Apex CEO". It is a real case, so experiments survive between visits.

Six steps cover the whole loop: staging an exhibit privately, opening the jury display with ⇧⌘J, publishing, marking up live, cutting the feed with blackout, and a wrap-up. The tour card sits in the bottom trailing corner and is never modal, so the app stays fully usable underneath it. Steps advance when you perform the real action rather than when you click Next — the card waits ("Waiting for a publish…") until you actually publish. Satisfied steps are skipped, Skip Tour leaves at any point, and progress is saved, so a half-finished tour resumes where it stopped. The last step offers Import My Case Files…, which ends the tour and opens the import panel.

### The same walkthrough, in writing

1. Create a case. Choose File → New Case… and pick a location. A case is a single .trialcase package holding your exhibits, depositions, clips, and annotations — copy that one file and you have copied the whole case. See Cases.

2. Import exhibits. Drag PDFs, images, video, or audio into the Exhibits sidebar, or use the toolbar's Import menu. Dragging them in opens the pending-import sheet, where you assign exhibit numbers and Bates ranges before anything lands in the case; the toolbar's Import Files… skips that step and commits them straight away. Office documents import too and preview inline. See Exhibits.

3. Connect the jury display. Plug in the courtroom display or projector, then press ⇧⌘J (or use the presentation bar) to open the jury window on it. What the jury sees is always exactly what the jury window shows — your workspace stays private on your own screen.

4. Stage and publish. Click an exhibit in the sidebar to stage it in your workspace. Press Return to publish it to the jury display. Arrow keys turn pages; typing a page number jumps straight to it. Return is the default publish key and is rebindable; Space never publishes — it controls video, and a double-tap opens Quick Search.

5. Annotate live. With an exhibit staged, use the annotation tools: highlight, callout, redaction, arrows, text labels, and a laser pointer that follows your cursor on the jury screen. Full coverage is in Presenting to the Jury.

6. Blackout. Press the blackout hotkey (or use the presentation bar) any time you need the jury screen dark — sidebars, objections, bench conferences. Press it again to restore the feed.

That is the core loop: stage privately, publish deliberately, blackout instantly. The three jury modes behind it — Blackout (⌘⇧B), Staged (⌘⇧S), and Live (⌘⇧L) — are covered in Presenting to the Jury.

### Finding your way around

The sidebar's five tabs switch with a click or a shortcut.

While dragging files from the Finder, hovering over a different tab for about half a second switches the workspace to it — the tab button is a waypoint, not a drop target, so carry the drag on into the sidebar it reveals.

The rest of the window: the title bar carries the case name, tints while the jury display is presenting, and shows a badge whenever a long-running mode — designation playback, impeachment, a binder script — is driving the courtroom; click it to see and stop each one. The detail pane shows whatever is selected and accepts dropped files. The inspector (⌥⌘I) reports the selected exhibit's status, labels, Bates data, and binders. Thin status bars stack above the presentation control bar while OCR, a background sync, or a playback list runs.

Pop-up windows — Edit Deposition, Bates Stamp, Mass Add, and the rest — carry a Larger toggle at the right of their title bar that scales text and controls up by a quarter. It is one setting for every pop-up: flip it once and they all follow, open or not, and it stays that way across launches. (The clip editor is already full-size and has no toggle.)

### Tips, walkthroughs, and the menus

The first time you open a case, a welcome sheet tours the main areas with a Show me button that jumps to each, and a reminder that ⇧⌘J opens the jury monitor. As you work, one-time coach marks — small popovers headed Tip — surface the less-obvious features the moment each first becomes relevant. Each carries a Don't show me tips button that turns them off everywhere, and none ever fires during the tour.

Several chapters of this guide carry a Show me in the app button, which drives the real app rather than describing it: the workspace switches to the right tab, an amber ring lands on the control being discussed, and a popover steps you through. Clicking the highlighted control advances the step. It appears only when a case is open and that chapter has a walkthrough.

The menus follow the obvious shape. File holds New, Open, and Close Case, Save Markup Snapshot… (⌘S), and File Renamer…. View holds the five sidebar tabs, the jury display, the three jury modes, Presenter Notes, and Trial Mode. Video holds play, shuttle, designation jumps, and rotation, enabled only with a video loaded. Help holds this guide, the tour, Ask Evidentiary, Keyboard Shortcuts (⌘/), and the Pre-Trial Check. Note that ⌘S is not "save case" — case data saves continuously. It saves a markup snapshot, and works only with a document on screen.

Cases

A case is one self-contained document. Every imported exhibit, deposition, clip list, binder, annotation, and saved position lives inside a single .trialcase package, which the Finder shows as one file with a preview thumbnail, the case name, and its exhibit and deposition counts. One case is open at a time.

### Create a new case

Choose File → New Case… (⌘N), or click New Case on the welcome screen. A save panel opens with the default name "Untitled"; the .trialcase extension is enforced by the panel, so the name you type is the name you get. Pick a location, create it, and the empty workspace opens. If the destination is not writable or the volume is full, an alert explains why.

Create the case on a local disk. Creating one inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive is allowed but discouraged, for the reasons below.

### Open and close

File → Open Case… (⌘O) or a double-click in the Finder opens an existing package. Selecting anything that is not a .trialcase package raises "Invalid Case File"; a case that cannot be read raises a separate alert carrying the reason.

The welcome screen lists recent cases with the case name and its enclosing directory. Hovering a row reveals a ✕ that removes the entry without ever touching the case file, and Clear All empties the list. A red Missing capsule marks a case whose file is no longer at the recorded path, and clicking such a row does nothing. To delete a case for good, delete the .trialcase package in the Finder.

File → Close Case (⌘⇧W) returns to the welcome screen and writes the case's Finder preview thumbnail.

### What is inside the package

A .trialcase file is a macOS package — a directory the Finder presents as a single file.

Because everything is inside the package, copying the .trialcase file is a complete backup. Right-click it and choose Show Package Contents to inspect it, but do not rename, move, or delete anything inside from the Finder — treat it as one opaque file: copy it, move it, back it up whole.

### Auto-save and the save indicator

There is no Save button to forget. Case data saves continuously, and a readout at the trailing end of the presentation control bar confirms it: "Saved 4:12 PM", or "Save error" with a tooltip carrying the reason.

Warning: Do not keep presenting through a persistent "Save error". Changes made while saves fail are at risk. The usual causes are a full volume, a case package on an external drive that has been unplugged, or a cloud provider that has taken the package away. Read the tooltip, fix the cause, and confirm the readout returns to "Saved" before continuing.

### Pick up where you left off

With Settings → General → "Auto-resume where you left off" on, Evidentiary continuously records your position — sidebar tab, staged exhibit and page, playback spot — into the case package, and reopening the case restores all of it silently. It is off by default, deliberately: on a trial day, a case that always opens in the same known state is easier to work with than one that reopens wherever last night ended.

If a saved position is ever the problem — a slow exhibit, the wrong tab, an odd state after a crash — check Open case in safe mode on the welcome screen before opening. The case comes up cold, like a first load, for that one open. Nothing is deleted; your saved place is not applied. The checkbox appears only when auto-resume is on, because with it off there is nothing to skip.

### Moving files in, or copying them

On import, Evidentiary either copies files into the case — the default, leaving originals where they were — or moves them, leaving no duplicate behind. The master switch is Settings → General → "Move files into case instead of copying", and the pending-import sheet offers the same choice per batch as Move originals into case; the two mirror each other. Two rules hold regardless: a file that cannot be moved, on a read-only or network volume, is copied instead, and images converted to PDF during import always leave the original in place.

Warning: With moving on, imported files disappear from their source location. On a shared discovery volume, or anywhere another person or tool depends on, leave the setting off.

### Keep the case off cloud drives

Keep the package on a local disk, not in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. Cloud providers can replace files with placeholders that stall when opened, and a placeholder that has to download in the courtroom can stall a publish with the jury watching.

Evidentiary warns once per open when it detects a case in a cloud-synced location, with a Don't warn again for this case checkbox. If the package is not fully local it pauses first on a download sheet showing byte progress; Cancel aborts the open and leaves the previously open case untouched. A case whose database itself has not finished downloading will not open at all. Before trial, force the whole package to download or pause syncing for the day, and run Help → Pre-Trial Check…, which checks for this.

### Quarantined files

Quarantine takes a problem file out of circulation without deleting it — for a document that crashes a viewer, refuses to render, or should not be openable until someone has reviewed it. Right-click the exhibit and choose Quarantine File…; the file moves into the case package's Quarantine folder, reviewable in the Finder. The sidebar row gains a red badge, and selecting the exhibit shows a gate instead of the document.

Mark as Safe… on that gate — or the same item on the context menu — returns the file to the case's exhibits. Nothing is deleted at any point, and the exhibit's numbering, Bates data, and admission record survive the round trip intact.

### Working across machines

A case is a single-operator, single-machine document. There is no shared or simultaneous editing.

Warning: Never open the same .trialcase package from two Macs at once, and never leave a case open on one Mac while a second Mac opens the copy a cloud service is syncing. The case database is not safe to edit that way, and doing so risks corrupting it. Close the case on one machine before opening it on another.

To move a case, close it and copy the whole package; an external drive is the most reliable transport. To collaborate, exchange the purpose-built files instead of passing a live case back and forth: a .dce clip list a colleague imports into their own copy, a .tws word-synced deposition that plays in the free companion player, or Sync XML for transcript timings. Changes made in two copies do not merge, so designate one copy as the master. See Reports and Exports.

Exhibits

The Exhibits tab (⌘1) is the master list of everything you might put in front of a witness or the jury: every PDF, image, scan, photograph, video, and audio file in the case. Selecting a row stages that document in your private detail pane, and nearly every exhibit operation — numbering, Bates stamping, OCR, redaction, stickers, admission status, binder filing — starts from a right-click on a row in this list.

### Import exhibits

Files reach the case through several doors, all of which funnel into the same review sheet before anything is committed.

Evidentiary accepts PDFs; JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP images; plain-text transcripts; MPEG-4, QuickTime, and AVI video plus other system-recognized movie types; MP3, MPEG-4 audio, WAV, and AIFF; DICOM imaging (.dcm, .dicom); and Office and iWork documents. The entire sidebar is a drop target — a dashed ring appears while files hover, unsupported types are filtered out of the drop without an error, and everything dropped in one gesture arrives as a single batch. Dropping files onto a binder folder row files them into that binder as it imports them.

Images are converted to PDF as they import. The converted copy becomes the exhibit, and the original image file always stays where it was, even with Move originals into case turned on.

### The pending-import sheet

Files dragged onto the sidebar stop in the Pending Imports sheet, titled with the batch size, before anything lands in the case. Each row shows a type icon, the file name, an editable Exhibit #, a Bates start field, and a ✕ that drops that file from the batch.

Warning: The toolbar's + → Import Files… does not stop here. Files chosen that way commit straight into the case, unnumbered and unstamped, with no chance to set exhibit numbers or Bates before they land. Drag files in instead when you want the sheet, or number them afterwards with Batch Label.

Space, Dash, and Underscore take everything up to that character's first occurrence as the number. For P-12 Smith Contract.pdf, Space yields P-12 and Dash yields P. Custom prefix… works the other way round: type the text that sits immediately *before* the number and the tag is whatever follows it, so Exhibit turns Exhibit 01 NAME.pdf into exhibit 01. The match ignores case, and a file that does not contain the prefix imports unnumbered. None imports every file unnumbered under its own name. Re-apply overwrites hand-edits in the Exhibit # fields, with one exception: Bates values read off the document itself outrank the file-name guess and survive it, keeping the stamp's own zero padding.

A pair of protections runs on every batch. Duplicates are skippable: each incoming file is hashed against the case, a match draws a "Duplicate of…" badge with an Import anyway checkbox, and duplicates you do not opt into are dropped while the rest of the batch imports. Conflicts are blockers: a duplicate exhibit number or Bates range flags its row, sorts it to the top, and keeps Import disabled until you edit the field or skip the row. There is no override for a conflict.

Committing assigns each exhibit its number and fans the Bates range across the document's pages as individual page stamps.

### Automatically import files from a folder

Import → Watched Folders… points Evidentiary at a scanner drop, a discovery folder, or a co-counsel share and imports whatever lands there. New files are copied into the case automatically; originals are never moved or changed.

Add Folder… adds a folder, the minus button stops watching one, and Scan Now forces an immediate sweep. Only the top level of each folder is watched — subfolders are ignored. A file must sit still for three seconds before it is copied, so half-written transfers are never grabbed, and files already in the case are skipped by hash.

Auto-imported files bypass the pending-import sheet, so they land unnumbered and unstamped, flagged with an INGEST capsule. The filter bar's Ingest chip shows only those exhibits — that is the tray view, and it appears only while something still needs review. Right-click → Mark as Reviewed (File from Ingest) clears the flag on one exhibit or a whole selection, and assigning a number clears it as a side effect. Working the Ingest chip down to zero before each session is the intended trial-day routine.

Import Exhibit List (CSV)… is the other bulk path: it reads a list exported from previous trial-presentation software and creates numbered exhibit records from it. Point Link PDF files from folder at the production folder and the import brings in the documents too; without it, rows arrive as placeholders with no file, and cannot be staged or OCR'd until a document is attached.

### Browsing, filtering, and sorting

The filter field matches display names, exhibit numbers, Bates prefixes and ranges, per-page Bates labels, file names, and OCR'd body text, with the text pass running off the main thread so typing stays responsive in a case with thousands of documents. Status chips — All, Admitted, Rejected, Unmarked, and Ingest — narrow it further, and one Clear filter button resets text and chips together.

The Sort chips order the list by Exhibit # (numeric-aware, so P-2 sorts before P-10), Name, or Date added; clicking the active chip reverses direction, and the choice is saved with the case. Beneath any sort the list keeps a manual order — drag rows to rearrange — and that manual order is what auto-numbering walks when it assigns numbers, so arrange first and number second.

Warning: Drag-reordering does nothing while any filter is active. The drag appears to succeed and leaves the order unchanged. Clear the filter first.

A view toggle flips the sidebar between Detailed View — page-1 thumbnails, hover buttons for Reveal in Finder, Edit Labels, and Delete, and the full context menu — and the compact List View, the default so large cases stay fast. Compact rows deliberately carry a reduced menu: PDF Tools, OCR, and the binder commands are in Detailed View only, so switch views when a command is missing. Either way a row shows its type glyph, an admission status dot, a quarantine or INGEST badge when either applies, the page count, and the Bates range.

The list navigates like the Finder: ↑ and ↓ walk exhibits and their page sub-rows, → expands a multi-page exhibit and then dives into page 1, ← collapses, and expanding also lists each page's saved snapshots. Selection follows the cursor, so the staged page tracks whichever row is highlighted. Every row drags out of the app as its underlying file — into the Finder, into Mail as an attachment, into Keynote onto a slide — handing out a copy, with the file inside the case package untouched.

### Selecting and acting in bulk

⌘-click toggles individual exhibits in and out of a selection and ⇧-click takes a range. Multiple selected rows float an action bar over the list — a live count, a Binder menu, a Sticker button, a Playlist picker, and Delete — and switch the right-click menu to its batch form, which sets admission status, marks exhibits demonstrative or substantive, files them into a binder, clears ingest flags, or deletes them together. Deleting is guarded by time rather than a second dialog: a toast reading "Deleted N exhibits" carries an Undo link for six seconds, and nothing is removed until it expires. After the toast is gone the delete is committed, and the Edit menu offers no second chance.

### Exhibit info

⌥⌘I — or the Exhibit Info button at the bottom left of the exhibit sidebar, beside the Evidence Lock — opens the inspector for the selected exhibit: everything the record will ask you about, in one column. Read-only readouts give the display label, file, page count, date added, and First shown, the first time it was published to the jury. Then the admission status pills, the Basis picker, Through witness, a Record note, and the Demonstrative toggle. Then the editable exhibit number and name, the Bates prefix, start, and computed range, whether a sticker is placed, whether OCR has run, and which binders it is filed in. The Edit Labels… popover on the row itself is the quick version; changes take effect when it closes.

### Assign Bates numbers

Evidentiary tracks a pair of labeling systems for every document: the exhibit number the court calls it by, and the per-page Bates stamps applied to it. Three tools manage the second, and a case-wide duplicate guard runs underneath all of them.

Batch Label (the stamp icon in the toolbar) numbers the whole case in one sitting. Auto-Number Exhibits takes a prefix (default "P-") and a start value and walks the list in its current manual order. Auto-Number Bates walks the same order, advancing the running number by each exhibit's page count so ranges tile continuously with no gaps or overlaps. The table beneath is for manual touch-up.

Warning: Both Apply buttons and Clear All Labels act on every exhibit in the case, not on a selection, and none of them is undoable. The only bulk restore is re-running the auto-numbering.

Bates Stamps put the numbers on the pages. Right-click a document → PDF Tools → Add Bates Stamps… (Edit Bates Stamps… when stamps exist) and set a Prefix, a Start number, a Zero-pad width (width 6 gives 000123), and a page window; preview cards show the first and last stamp the settings produce. The sheet seeds itself from the exhibit's stored values and the full page range, so the common case is open, glance, Apply. Stamps are drawn at the bottom-right of each page and are non-destructive — the underlying PDF is never modified — and applying writes the prefix and start back to the exhibit's metadata so the sidebar and the filter field agree with the page.

Detect Bates Number reads a stamp already applied to the document: it searches the bottom edge of page 1, text layer first and OCR for scans, concentrating on the bottom-right corner and ignoring stray tokens like PAGE, EXHIBIT, and VOL. It either sets and stamps the value, tells you the exhibit already carries it, offers to Replace a different stored value and re-stamp every page, reports a collision with another exhibit, or reports finding nothing.

Underneath all of this runs one rule: no page in a case may share a Bates stamp with another, because a duplicate makes a page unfindable by citation. The guard is case-wide and page-level, runs wherever stamps are created, and blocks rather than warns. The fix is always the same — change the prefix, the start number, or the page range. When a document was genuinely produced twice under separate productions, change the prefix rather than the range so each copy stays independently citable.

Warning: PDF Tools → Remove Bates Stamps acts immediately, with no confirmation and no undo, and Clear All Stamps in the stamp sheet says so plainly. Restoring stamps means re-running the sheet.

### Run OCR on a document

A scanned document has no text layer until you run OCR. Right-click the exhibit → PDF Tools → Run OCR (the item reads Re-run OCR when text is stored). The scan runs in the background at low priority, page by page, with progress in a thin status bar — "OCR: Contract — page 4 of 22", or "OCR: 3 exhibits — 18 of 96 pages" when several run together. There is no cancel and no completion alert; keep working, and the inspector's OCR readout flips from Not run to Done when the text lands.

OCR is per-document by design — nothing is scanned automatically on import — so you choose what gets read and a case with thousands of documents stays fast. Scan what you expect to search or redact rather than the whole production. Running it unlocks the filter's text search, ⌘F find-on-document, keyword and semantic results in Quick Search, the OCR fallback used by Bates detection, and the Redaction Assistant, which refuses to run without stored text.

### Redact an exhibit

Redaction is how you hide privileged information on an exhibit before it reaches the jury: black bars over confidential material — a Social Security number, a bank account, a name under seal — drawn over the page rather than into it. The Redact tool in the markup strip draws them by hand; drag a rectangle over the material to cover, and click the tool a second time to pick the fill: the classic black bar, white, grey, or a blur that obscures a face or a logo without the hard rectangle. The tools themselves are covered in Presenting to the Jury.

Suggest Redactions… finds them for you. Right-click an OCR'd exhibit → PDF Tools → Suggest Redactions… and Evidentiary scans the stored text for Social Security numbers, emails, phone numbers, birth dates, and account numbers, then proposes a redaction box over each hit. Every row shows a pre-selected checkbox, a type capsule (SSN, Email, Phone, DOB, Account #), the matched text, and its page. Uncheck anything you want to keep and press Apply. The boxes become ordinary redaction marks you can move, resize, or remove, and they appear on the jury display in the same instant if the exhibit is live. A clean scan reports No PII found; an exhibit with no OCR text tells you to run OCR first.

Warning: These are heuristic suggestions, not a privilege review. Review every row before applying, and remember the assistant can only find what OCR read — handwriting, poor scans, and untagged images produce no hits at all. Nothing in this tool certifies a document as clean.

Redactions are treated as privilege marks, not as drawings, so they are durable in a way ordinary markup is not. They survive turning the page, closing and reopening the exhibit, and both Erase All Annotations commands on the tool's menu, and restoring an older snapshot grafts them back on — a snapshot taken before the redaction cannot un-redact the page. Clicking a bar directly with the rubber tool removes it.

Warning: ⇧E (Clear Annotations on Page) is the exception — it removes redactions along with everything else on the page. Do not use it to tidy a page that carries privilege redactions.

Inside the case, redactions stay editable overlay marks and the underlying PDF is untouched, so anything leaving the case must go out through a path that burns them in. Export Flattened PDF, on the presenter toolbar, writes a rasterized copy in either of these variants — Published Marks Only…, the version of the page the jury has actually seen, and All Marks (Including Drafts)…. A blur is written as real pixelation, so the obscured content is gone from the output and cannot be recovered from it. That makes flattening the correct hand-off for the court and for opposing counsel. The QR-code commands burn redactions in the same way, so a paper copy can never show what the screen hides — see QR / Barcode Recall.

### Split a production PDF into separate exhibits

When discovery arrives as one giant PDF, right-click it → PDF Tools → Split into Exhibits… to carve it into separate exhibits without leaving the app. Choose At page ranges and type the ranges from the production log — "1-4, 5-12, 13-30", where gaps are fine when you need only some of the documents — or choose Every N pages for a fixed interval.

Name parts sets the base name for the new exhibits, First number optionally assigns sequential exhibit numbers from a starting value like "P-12" (trailing digits increment, and zero padding is preserved), and Read Bates ranges from the pages reads each part's stamp off its own pages. Malformed input is caught before anything is created, and a live plan summary reads back what will happen — "4 exhibits · uses 28 of 30 pages".

The split is additive: the parts arrive as ordinary exhibits at the end of the list, and the original stays in the case with its numbering, stamps, and markup intact. Deleting it, if the parts replace it, is a separate and deliberate step.

### Fix a slow PDF or a video that stutters

Right-click → PDF Tools → Optimize PDF… repairs a document that scrolls slowly, renders wrong, or refuses to open. It offers three methods, in the order you should try them.

Back up the original first is on by default, and the result panel reports the page count, the size before and after, and where the backup went. Your markup is stored separately and are not affected. Re-open the exhibit to see the optimized version.

Warning: Rasterizing destroys the text layer. Find-on-document, OCR-based search, semantic matches, and the Redaction Assistant all stop working on that exhibit until you run OCR again. Work down the list — repair first, compress second, rasterize only when the earlier methods fail.

A video exhibit gets Optimize Video for Playback… in the same position instead. It re-encodes the file in place to a clean H.264 MP4, which fixes video that scrubs slowly, stutters, or fails during clip export — and clip times and transcript sync are preserved, so nothing downstream shifts. Cancel aborts safely, because the original is not swapped out until the new file is finished. The same sheet reaches every volume of a multi-volume deposition from the Edit Deposition sheet.

A run refuses rather than risk the case when the source cannot be decoded at all, when there is no video track, when free space is under roughly three times the original, or on duration drift — a re-encode that came out a different length. That last one is a safety refusal, not a bug: a length change would silently invalidate every clip time and sync point on the volume, so Evidentiary keeps the original instead.

If a file misbehaves badly enough to be a hazard, Quarantine File… takes it out of circulation without deleting it. See Cases.

### Swap a file for an updated version

When a corrected version of a document arrives, right-click the exhibit → PDF Tools → Swap File for Updated Version… and choose the replacement. The exhibit keeps its number, sticker, markup, admission history, and place in every binder and link that points at it. When the page count matches, nothing is lost: Bates stamps and the sticker re-apply to the new file.

Warning: When the page count differs, Evidentiary asks first, and proceeding clears the per-page Bates labels, the saved page orientation and deskew, and the stored OCR text — all three are keyed to page numbers that no longer line up. Markup is deliberately kept, because redaction work is too expensive to discard silently, but they may now sit on the wrong pages. Re-stamp, re-run OCR, review the marked pages, and re-check any Bates citations already circulated.

### Ignore a cover sheet

Productions often arrive with a cover sheet nobody wants the jury to see. Right-click the exhibit → PDF Tools → Ignore Cover Page and the first page is set aside: page 2 becomes page 1 everywhere — presenter, thumbnails, search, Bates detection, print, and export — and the sidebar's page count drops by one. The page is parked inside the case, so Show Cover Page on the same menu puts it back. Bates labels, page orientation, OCR text, markup, and binder or playlist page jumps all shift with the pages, so each stays on the same physical page. A multiple selection gets Ignore Cover Pages / Show Cover Pages under its Cover Page section; single-page files and media are skipped.

### Court stickers

An exhibit sticker is the digital equivalent of the colored label a clerk sticks on a paper exhibit. Right-click → Add Exhibit Sticker… (Edit Exhibit Sticker… when it has one) opens an editor with a live render of page 1; drag the sticker card itself to position it, clamped so it cannot leave the page. New stickers start at the top-right corner. Stickers are drawn over the document and never into it, they render on page 1 above your markup, and they appear on the jury display and on any paper or exported copy — what the jury sees is what the page carries. No markup tool can grab or remove one mid-session.

Each preset's main text sits on a second line — "PLAINTIFF'S" over "EXHIBIT", and so on — and applying a preset keeps the size, position, shape, rotation, and visibility you already dialed in, changing only the colors and the wording. Set the geometry a single time for the case, then switch presets freely.

Beyond the presets there is full control: the main text and its point size, the label point size, background, text, and border colors, the shape (Rounded, Square, or Ellipse), a size preset or an exact width and height with optional Constrain proportions, rotation from −45° to 45°, and a Visible on page switch that hides a sticker without deleting it. Sizes are physical inches, so a sticker stays the same real size on Letter, Legal, and oversized pages.

Use exhibit number is on by default and ties the drawn label to the exhibit's number, live — renumber the exhibit anywhere and the placed sticker follows, with no visit to the editor. Turn it off to type something else. Number your exhibits before you sticker them; a sticker on an unnumbered exhibit draws a blank label until the number arrives, then fills in on its own.

With several exhibits selected, the action bar's Sticker button stamps the default Plaintiff sticker on each document that lacks one, skipping media and never overwriting an existing sticker. Because it skips already-stickered exhibits, the batch cannot restyle a set: batch-stamp first, then apply the Defendant preset per exhibit, which keeps each sticker's placement.

Save and Remove Sticker push straight into the live presenter, so an exhibit already on screen updates without reloading. Edit stickers in Staged or Blackout mode if you would rather the jury not watch you work.

### Track admission

Every exhibit carries an admission status, a colored dot on its row, and a timestamp for when that status was last set.

In evidence means Admitted or Conditionally Admitted. Only those statuses expose the Basis picker — Without Objection, Over Objection, or By Stipulation, the objection posture the record needs for appeal — and only those statuses pass the Evidence Lock described in Presenting to the Jury. Separately, any exhibit can be marked a demonstrative: an aid shown to the jury but generally not sent to the jury room.

The gavel button in the Exhibits toolbar opens the Admission Board, the trial-day tracker: every exhibit as one editable table row, with a Demo checkbox, a Witness field, a status picker, a basis picker that dims until the exhibit is in evidence, a limited-purpose or connect-up note, and the timestamp of the last change. Filter chips carry live counts for each status, plus a Demonstratives chip for aids only.

The same statuses can be set from three other places, and all four write one record per exhibit: the inspector's pill grid, a right-click on one or many sidebar rows, and — for the exhibit on screen — the strip of status pills under the presenter's markup toolbar, where clicking the active pill clears it back to unmarked. The rhythm during an evidentiary session is stage, publish, press the matching pill as the court rules, then name the sponsoring witness.

Conditional admissions are flagged in the Pre-Trial Check so you remember to connect them up. The board's Export Clerk Report… is covered in Reports and Exports.

### Markup snapshots

Working markup does not survive closing an exhibit, or even navigating away from the page. Only page orientation, page adjustments, and redactions persist on their own, so snapshots are the save mechanism for markup you intend to keep.

⌘S (File → Save Markup Snapshot…) saves the exhibit's current markup under a name, with a preview of exactly what you saw. Snapshots appear as sub-rows under the exhibit's pages and in Quick Search; clicking one restores it. Right-click a snapshot to Restore, Rename…, Duplicate, Update with Current State — offered while that exhibit is staged — or Delete. Side-by-side captures restore the full split-pane comparison. Mark up tonight, save the snapshot, restore it in front of the jury tomorrow.

### Rename many files in one pass

File → File Renamer… batch-renames files on disk, with or without a case open. Point it at Case Exhibits — the files backing the open case, with an optional Update exhibit names to match — or at any Finder Folder, which is handy for tidying a production before import.

Rules apply top to bottom, each working on the result of the one above it, so order matters: Find & Replace (with optional regex and $1 capture references), Insert Text, Sequence Number, Change Case, and Set Extension. Drag rows to reorder them. The preview table shows every file as Original → New Name and recalculates as you edit, flagging rows it cannot rename — an empty or illegal name, a name a second file would also take, a name already taken. Conflicting rows are skipped rather than blocking the batch.

Warning: In Case Exhibits mode the rename rewrites files inside the case package. Revert Last Rename undoes the most recent batch only, so check the result before running a second batch — the first can no longer be reverted after you do.

### Search, export, and other file types

The sidebar filter is the fast local search. Inside a staged document, ⌘F finds text on the page itself, and the yellow hits are private to your screen and never reach the jury. For everything else in the case in a single search — document text, transcripts, snapshots, and app actions — see Quick Search and the Command Palette.

The share button in the Exhibits toolbar exports the full list as PDF, plain text, or Excel-ready CSV, with toggleable sections and columns — exhibit number, Bates range, date added, date first shown to the jury — plus optional QR recall codes on the PDF. Every choice persists for the next export. See Reports and Exports.

A couple of file types get their own surfaces rather than the PDF presenter. DICOM medical images (.dcm) open in an imaging viewer: a Slice slider walks a multi-frame study, Window level and width are the standard radiology brightness and contrast controls, and Publish Frame sends the frame you settled on to the jury display. Office and iWork documents preview inline with an Open in button for the native app and a Convert to PDF button that adds a markable copy as a new exhibit. Until they are converted, Office documents have no markup, no snapshots, and no PDF Tools.

Media

The Media tab (⌘2) is the same master list as Exhibits, filtered to just the audio and video that stands as evidence in its own right — a 911 call, surveillance footage, a recorded interview — so you can find and stage it without scrolling past every document. These are the same exhibit records seen through a narrower lens, not a separate library. (Deposition video lives on the Depositions tab instead.)

### The list

Each row carries the exhibit-number capsule, the name, the kind, the file name, and the admission status dot. Hovering reveals Reveal in Finder and Delete; a swipe deletes, and deletion asks first. The list is single-selection, unlike the multi-select Exhibits list, and rows drag straight out to Finder, Mail, or Keynote when you need the underlying file. Dropping files anywhere on the sidebar imports them the usual way.

Note: Media exhibits have no Bates fields, no exhibit sticker, and no PDF Tools submenu. In that position the Exhibits-tab context menu offers Optimize Video for Playback… instead. Everything else — importing, admission status, binders, snapshots — works exactly as it does for a document, because these are exhibits.

### The video player

Click a row and the detail pane becomes a player: a toolbar across the top, the picture in the middle, a transport bar beneath, and — on demand — a transcript panel beside it and a caption band under it. Publishing a video to the jury works exactly as it does for a document, so nothing here is a separate presentation mode; see Presenting to the Jury.

The toolbar names the exhibit — a purple film glyph for video, an orange waveform for audio — and holds four toggles: the annotation overlay, the caption band, page:line numbers on those captions, and the transcript side panel. A red LIVE pill appears while the video is streaming to the jury, and a Clip n/N counter with previous (P), next (N), and stop (Esc) joins it while designations play. There is deliberately no "stream to jury" button: in Staged mode Publish mounts the video like any other exhibit, and in Live mode selecting it does.

### Transport

Designation ranges draw on the timeline as party-colored bars — solid for included, faint for excluded — with the start-point marker as an orange bar and flag. Click the track to seek, press and drag to scrub.

Note: Space is owned by the global key monitor and toggles playback whenever a video is loaded. While a video is mounted, J, K, L, I, N, and P shadow the annotation-tool keys that otherwise own K and L — the tools return the moment no video is loaded. K pauses only; it never resumes.

A start point (I, also Video ▸ Set Start Point) cues a long video to the passage you intend to publish so the jury never sees the run-up; it is stored with the exhibit and survives closing and reopening it. Send Frame publishes the current frame as a still image, freezing the picture while you scrub on your own screen, and is disabled unless the jury window is open and the mode is not Blackout.

Playback speed runs from 0.5× to 2× in seven presets. The rate is app-wide and persists across launches, so setting 1.5× in the clip editor means playback opens at 1.5× everywhere. Return it to 1.0× before broadcasting to the jury.

### Transcript panel and captions

The transcript toggle opens a side panel — the lightweight transcript for a plain video or audio exhibit, an interview recording, a 911 call, body-cam footage. Import takes a single plain-text file and Paste parses transcript text off the clipboard. The search field navigates rather than filters: the transcript stays on screen, hits highlight in place, and Return and Shift-Return step forward and back with wrapping. Clicking a row sets the selection start and seeks the video to that line; Shift-clicking sets the end, and Create Clip builds a designation from that line range and its timestamps. The panel follows the playhead as the video plays.

The caption band under the picture shows the previous, current, and next lines at once. It draws only the lines the current playback context admits, so testimony outside the designated or admitted range cannot leak into the captions while the jury is watching. Its styling is the same control set used for clip subtitles; see The Clip Editor.

### Audio exhibits

An audio exhibit has no picture, so it gets its own surface: a large pulsing waveform disc, the name, the file name, and a big monospaced running clock. Its transport is built for listening — a scrubber with no designation bars, jogs of 5 and 10 seconds each way, and the same start-point controls. There is no annotation overlay and no Send Frame, because there is no picture to mark or to send.

### Annotating video

The annotation toggle drops a transparent canvas over the player with its own tool strip. The video is the page here — there is no layer beneath the marks — and drawing works over the moving picture as well as a paused frame. The tools, gestures, color wells, stroke widths, and text sizes match the document tools described in Presenting to the Jury.

Note: Video annotations persist with the exhibit in full, so a marked-up video reopens with its marks intact. This differs from the PDF presenter, where working marks are discarded when you turn the page or close the exhibit.

Warning: The overlay's Erase All Annotations clears every frame of the exhibit, not only the current one. Its only undo is the standard undo stack — leaving the overlay is not a way to get the marks back.

### Fixing a sideways video

Portrait phone footage that presents on its side is the usual case of missing or wrong orientation metadata. Video ▸ Rotate Video Clockwise and Rotate Video Counterclockwise turn the picture 90° each. The correction is stored per exhibit and honored by every player in the app — the workspace player, the clip editor, designation playback, the impeachment player, and the jury display — and the change remounts the video in place, keeping the playhead and the play or pause state.

Warning: This is a playback correction only. It is not written back into the source file and it does not carry into exported clips — exported video follows the file's own orientation metadata. If a sideways video has to leave Evidentiary right-side up, correct the source file and re-import it before exporting.

### Repairing a video that will not play

Re-encoding fixes files that scrub slowly, stutter, or fail during clip export. Right-click a video in the Exhibits tab and choose Optimize Video for Playback…, or use the sparkle button on a volume row in Edit Deposition (with Optimize All Volumes for a multi-volume deposition). The result is a clean H.264 MP4 with clip times and transcript sync preserved. Back up the original(s) first keeps the backup next to the video inside the case. Cancel aborts the encode in flight, and the original is untouched until the finished file is swapped in.

Note: The duration-drift refusal is a safety measure. A re-encode that changed length would silently invalidate every clip time and sync point on that volume, so Evidentiary keeps the original instead.

### Office documents and medical imaging

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and RTF files open in a Quick Look viewer with three buttons: Open in <app> launches the original in its native application, which is how you screen-share the host app's own window; Convert to PDF exports a PDF copy and adds it as a new exhibit, leaving the original untouched; Reveal shows the file in Finder. Office exhibits publish under the usual mode rules, but they carry no markup — annotation tools, snapshots, page adjustments, and the file-rewriting PDF tools all need a rendered PDF, so convert first if you need any of them.

Files ending in .dcm or .dicom open in the imaging viewer, headed with the modality and series description ("CT — Chest w/o contrast"), the patient name, the study date, and the pixel dimensions. Publish Frame puts the current frame on the jury display; it is disabled when nothing has decoded, the jury display is closed, or the mode is Blackout. A Slice slider steps through multi-frame studies, and a Window row gives the standard radiology controls — level for brightness, width for contrast — with Reset returning both to the file's defaults. That row appears only for monochrome studies carrying raw pixel values. The imaging viewer has no annotation tools and no snapshots; it publishes frames.

Quick Search and the Command Palette

Tap Space twice to open Quick Search from anywhere in the workspace — one box that searches everything in the case: exhibits by number, name, Bates, or file name, the text inside OCR'd documents, transcripts by page and line, saved markup snapshots, and the app's own commands. It is the fastest way to get an exhibit on screen without touching the sidebar, and the fastest way to run a command whose shortcut you have not memorized.

### Working the palette

The search field takes focus immediately. Type to filter, ↑ and ↓ move the selection, ⏎ activates it, and ⎋ — or a click on the backdrop — closes. A ✕ clears the field, and the footer restates the keys beside the case's exhibit count. With nothing matching, the palette reads "No matching exhibits or actions".

Note: Space itself still controls video. With a video loaded, the first tap of the double-tap toggles play or pause before the palette opens. Publishing is never on Space.

### Finding an exhibit

Exhibit results rank by how directly the query hits the exhibit's identity, in this order:

• Exact or numeric exhibit-number match — "12" finds P-12
• Exhibit-number substring
• Name prefix
• Name contains
• Bates number
• File name
• Admission status text — typing "admitted" lists the admitted exhibits

Each row shows the status dot, type icon, number capsule, name, size ("N pages", "Audio", or "Video"), Bates number, and admission status. ⏎ stages the selection.

Note: A Bates query lands on the exact page carrying that stamp, not merely on the exhibit — type a Bates number read off a paper copy and the corresponding page opens directly.

### Semantic matches

Below the exact results, a SEMANTIC MATCHES section lists pages whose meaning matches the query even when no word does: "vehicle collision" surfaces a page about a truck accident, and "the email about delaying the shipment" finds it even though those words never appear. Each row shows the exhibit label, "p. N", and a snippet of the matched page; activating it opens that page.

Semantic matches need at least three characters, appear about a third of a second after typing pauses, and show up to eight pages that clear a fixed relevance floor — weak matches are suppressed rather than shown as noise. The section covers only exhibits that already carry OCR text, and it never runs OCR itself.

### Running a command

Actions appear alongside exhibits, each with its live hotkey chip, so the palette doubles as a command palette.

Type a few letters of what you want — "blackout", "publish", "split", "import" — and press ⏎.

### The wider search window

⇧⌘F — or the sidebar's Search transcripts… pill, or the palette's Search Transcripts action — opens a resizable Search window that reaches further than the palette. Results update about a fifth of a second after typing stops; ⎋ closes it.

• Page:line jump. A query like 45:12 pins a Go To & Actions section at the top with one jump row per deposition, opening that transcript at exactly that page and line — the fastest way to reach a citation called out by opposing counsel.
• Quick actions. Blackout, Staged Mode, Live Mode, Open Jury Display, and Enter or Exit Trial Mode appear in the same pinned section, so presentation state can be changed from the keyboard alone.
• Depositions match by deponent, with an "Open transcript" action.
• Exhibits match on label and file name, capped at ten rows.
• OCR content fills the exhibit section out to that cap, shown with a short excerpt around the match. These are exact text matches, not semantic ones.
• Snapshots match by name, capped at eight. Opening one restores it; a side-by-side snapshot restores the full two-pane comparison.
• Transcript hits come last, grouped by deponent with a count, each row showing the page:line reference, the synced timestamp, and a snippet with the matched words bolded. Results are capped at 500 — narrow the query rather than paging through a broad one.

Note: Only synced depositions are searchable here. A deposition with a transcript attached but no sync is invisible to this search until you sync it.

### How semantic search works

Meaning-based search runs entirely on the Mac, on Apple's English sentence-embedding model. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is persisted: the index builds on the first search, rebuilds when the OCR'd corpus changes, and is released when the case closes, so on a large case the first semantic search after opening can take a moment. If the macOS English embedding asset is not present, semantic features hide themselves silently and keyword search is unaffected. Semantic matching is available in this palette and in the clip editor's "Find testimony about…" toggle; the global search window and the on-document find bar are exact-match only.

Presenting to the Jury

The jury display mirrors nothing automatically — you control every pixel that reaches the courtroom. You publish an exhibit to the jury when you are ready, you freeze the jury display on what it already shows while you work ahead in private, and you black out the screen the instant something goes sideways. This chapter covers second monitor setup, the three presentation modes, the annotation tools you mark up with, the snapshots that save that markup, and the trial-day lockdown that protects the whole thing.

### Second monitor setup

The jury button shows a monitor icon and the caption Open while the display is closed. With it open, the icon becomes a mode-letter badge — B, S, or L for Blackout, Staged, or Live — and the caption becomes Close.

Your primary display, the one carrying the menu bar, always stays private. Every other connected screen — a second monitor, a courtroom TV, the projector — carries the jury feed, and they are driven in lockstep: mode changes, publishes, page flips, and laser movement reach every jury window together.

To keep one of a pair of external monitors as your own workspace, use the Displays button beside Open Jury (or right-click that button). It opens a Show Jury View On popover that draws your monitors in their real arrangement, the way System Settings does, each tile labeled This Mac, Jury, or Private. Click an external tile to toggle it between jury output and private; the rest still mirror, and your choice is remembered between sessions. The primary tile cannot be assigned and says so with a padlock.

Identify Displays — in that popover and in the View menu — flashes a large numbered card on every screen simultaneously, each with the display's name and role badge. Courtroom carts frequently present a pair of identical panels; use this to match physical monitors to tiles before assigning jury output.

Auto-open on connect is a persisted checkbox in the same popover, off until you set it: with it on, the jury display opens by itself when an external display appears. Separately and always on, Evidentiary reopens the jury window the instant a display carrying jury output returns, in the mode it left. Blackout first if you are not certain what will be on screen when the picture comes back.

Warning: With no external display attached, opening the jury view takes over your own screen. Evidentiary warns first and offers Open Anyway; ⌘⎋ exits at any time. Use it for rehearsal, not in the courtroom.

The jury window is deliberately unlike a normal window: borderless, covering the whole screen frame including behind the Dock and menu bar, so no title bar reaches the projector, and black wherever content does not cover it. It never takes keyboard focus, so your typing always lands in the operator window. When Evidentiary is not the active application it drops to a normal window level, so a co-counsel's slideshow or a document camera can present over it, and rises again when you come back.

Test Pattern in the display picker sends a calibration image to the jury display: SMPTE color bars, a grayscale ramp, an overscan border at the very edge of the frame, a perfect circle, and a caption naming the resolution. If the circle is an oval, the display or projector is scaling non-uniformly and every exhibit will be distorted the same way. If any part of the overscan border is off-screen, so is the edge of every page you publish. Showing the pattern opens the jury display, leaves Blackout, and tears down any mounted exhibit, so run it before the jury is seated.

### Black out the screen, freeze it, or go live

Evidentiary has exactly three presentation modes, and the whole operator model rests on them.

Blackout is the panic button. One key makes the jury screen dark. It is not a dimmer — the picture cuts to black and the sources feeding it stop: designation playback, an active impeachment, a video stream, and a deposition playback session all halt, the mounted hosts tear down, and the jury exhibit name clears. Leaving Blackout returns to whichever of Staged or Live was last active, and from a cold start that is Staged.

Staged is the working mode and the default. The jury display holds a frozen copy of your last publish while you turn pages, mark up, and pull up the next exhibit in private; new marks are not pushed as you draw them. Switching from Live back to Staged locks the jury display onto exactly what it was showing at that instant — this is how you freeze the jury display mid-argument. If a video was playing it pauses and holds the last frame, with a cue pill reading "Jury holds frame — Play resumes to jury".

Live is a mirror. The jury display follows your page, your zoom, your scroll position, and each annotation as you commit it. Selecting an exhibit mounts it immediately; video, Office files, and the side-by-side stage mount themselves without a publish.

B toggles Blackout from anywhere in the workspace and is disabled while the jury display is closed. G flips between Staged and Live but does nothing from Blackout, so a stray keystroke cannot restore a picture you deliberately cut. All of these are rebindable in Settings ▸ Hotkeys, and every tooltip and cue reflects your current bindings.

Warning: In Live, everything you do is on the jury's screen — including opening an exhibit you did not intend. Staged is the default working mode for a reason. Use Live for deliberate, continuous markup in front of the jury.

### Publish an exhibit to the jury

Publish is the large prominent button in the presentation control bar, and its default key is ⏎ (Return), rebindable like the rest. It is enabled only when the mode is Staged and the jury display is open.

Note: Space never publishes. A single Space plays or pauses video; a double-tap of Space opens Quick Search.

A publish takes a frozen copy of your staging view: the document, every published mark, the sticker, the aspect ratio, the page count, the zoom level, the pan offset, the continuous-scroll position, the page brightness and contrast adjustments, the Bates value, and the exhibit label. The jury display holds that copy until the next publish, a mode change, or a blackout. Publish resolves its target in a fixed order — a frozen side-by-side pair when the split stage is up, then a video exhibit, then the staged PDF or image exhibit, then an Office file. Video is the exception to freezing: publishing a video mounts it and starts playback, and it stays live.

A Publish that cannot do anything beeps and shows a transient pill beside the button: "Jury is dark — leave Blackout to publish", "Live already mirrors your screen", or "Nothing staged — open an exhibit first".

The out-of-sync cue is the most useful indicator on the bar. In Staged, whenever the jury display is showing something other than your current staging view, a warning pill appears reading "Jury p.N · Staging p.M · ⏎ to publish", or naming a different exhibit entirely. Clicking the pill publishes. If the pill is absent in Staged, your screen and the jury display agree.

Publishing also stamps the exhibit's "first shown to jury" date, a single time and permanently, and adds an entry to Presentation History.

### The publish guards

Court-excluded exhibits are always guarded, in every mode and regardless of any other setting. Mark an exhibit Excluded on the Admission Board as soon as a motion-in-limine ruling comes down, and any attempt to show it raises a modal alert naming the exhibit and warning that showing it may cause a mistrial or sanctions. Show Anyway is a destructive button, not an OK button.

Evidence Lock is the second guard, and it is yours to set. The All Exhibits / Admitted Exhibits toggle at the bottom of the exhibit list restricts the jury to evidence that is actually in. With it engaged, publishing (or, in Live, auto-showing) an exhibit that is not admitted or conditionally admitted is refused, so an unadmitted, merely-offered, or rejected exhibit cannot reach the jury by a mis-click. The alert's Unlock & Show clears the lock for the case and then publishes; it does not make a one-time exception. The lock is per-case and remembered between sessions.

In Live there is no dialog, because a modal cannot arrive fast enough to matter. The jury display holds what it was already showing and a cue appears on your screen instead.

### Reverse publish

Reverse Publish (⇧R, or the reverse-monitor button in the control bar) pulls the jury's exhibit back into your viewer, at the page the jury is on — the opposite direction from Publish. Use it after working ahead privately, or when opposing counsel asks about "the document on the screen". It is enabled when the jury display is open, the mode is not Blackout, and the jury is showing a PDF exhibit. Video, Office files, and the side-by-side stage are not reverse-pullable.

### Presentation history and presenter notes

The History button in the control bar lists what has gone to the jury display this session: a glyph, the name, "Page N of M", and the time. Clicking a row loads that exhibit at that page into your viewer. Recall does not publish — the jury display is unaffected until you press Publish. Impeachment player sessions are logged here too.

Note: History is a session list. The permanent court record of what was shown is the per-exhibit "first shown to jury" stamp and File ▸ Export Exhibits Shown Record…. Any binder folder can also be designated the Target Notebook, a running log of what actually reached the jury: each publish files that exhibit and page automatically, and ⇧B adds the page you have staged. See Playlists and Binders.

⌘⌥N (View ▸ Presenter Notes) mounts a private notes strip beneath the staged exhibit — talking points, the next question, the objection to anticipate. A chip shows which page the note belongs to, and the field grows from one line to four. Notes are stored per page and travel inside the case package. The strip is operator-only: never drawn on the jury display, never included in a flattened export, and not shown while the side-by-side stage is up.

### Zoom into a document and rotate a page

A one-pixel white outline on the staging canvas marks the edge of the jury screen. Content outside that outline will not be on the jury display.

Use = and − to zoom into a document from the keyboard, and ⇧= or ⇧− to jump straight to the top or bottom half — ideal for showing one clause big. The edge presets clamp between 2× and 4×; pressing the same one again returns to fit-page.

Pan a zoomed page by holding ⌃ and dragging with any tool armed, by dragging with the Select tool, by scrolling, or by pinching on a trackpad. Modifiers are read live during a drag, so pressing ⌃ mid-stroke abandons the in-flight mark and pans instead. Zoom and pan travel with a publish — the frozen copy the jury holds includes your zoom level, pan offset, and scroll position.

To rotate a page, use the rotate menu in the toolbar or the keyboard: [ and ] turn 90° at a time, ⇧[ and ⇧] nudge by a single degree for deskewing a crooked scan, stopping at ±15°. The menu also holds Reset Rotation. Rotation is per page, is recorded in the undo stack, and is one of the few presenter changes that survives closing and reopening the exhibit.

Note: Video rotation is a separate control on the Video menu and does not use these keys. See Media.

### Turning pages and continuous scroll

Move with ←/↑ and →/↓, and jump to the ends with ⇧←/Home and ⇧→/End. Digits typed on the canvas collect into a page-number buffer with a "Page N" pill; ⏎ commits and ⎋ cancels. A ⌘-scroll or trackpad swipe flips pages on both your screen and the jury display, one page per swipe. Arrow keys yield to the sidebar when your last click was in a list, so Finder-style browsing still works, and clicking a page sub-row in the sidebar stages that page directly.

The continuous-scroll toggle turns a multi-page exhibit into one scrolling column instead of paged turns. Entering it resets zoom and pan and opens centered on the page you were reading; leaving it lands you on the page in the middle of the view. Scrolling is disabled while a drawing tool is armed, so a drag intended as a highlight cannot scroll the document out from under it — the Select tool scrolls cleanly. The Pause button freezes the view exactly where it sits, including halfway across a page break, so you can annotate a seam without the page drifting. The jury mirror is scroll-locked to your published position rather than free-scrolling.

The thin strip under the annotation toolbar carries the admission pills for the exhibit on screen; clicking one sets that status and clicking the active pill clears it. See Exhibits for the full admission workflow.

### The annotation tools

A pair of rules govern the whole strip. Click the active tool again, or right-click any tool, to open its options. And tool keys only fire while an exhibit is on the canvas — they are shadowed by the video transport keys while a video is loaded, so with a video mounted K pauses and L jogs forward instead of arming the laser and the line.

Every key is rebindable in Settings ▸ Hotkeys. A pair of color memories exist: the highlighter keeps its own color, and every other tool shares a single color, red by default. Line thickness applies to arrows, lines, and shapes; text size to labels.

Text drops a label that takes focus immediately, so you can type without a second click; right-clicking a placed label offers size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and cut, copy, and paste. Laser follows your pointer, stays where you stop, leaves no mark, and creates nothing to undo; right-click it to choose the classic dot or the comet trail, and the choice is remembered. Measure is a proportional ruler — it reports the span as a percentage of the page in each axis, with no calibration step and no real-world units, so do not present a measurement as inches or feet.

Redact covers material with your choice of the classic black bar, white, grey, or a blur that obscures a face or logo without the hard rectangle. Redactions are treated as privilege marks, not drawings, and behave differently from every other tool.

Warning: Redactions survive both Erase All commands by design, but ⇧E removes them along with everything else. Do not use ⇧E to tidy a page that carries privilege redactions.

### Magnify part of a document for the jury

The callout tool (C) is the blow-up: it magnifies a region of the page into a floating panel while dimming the rest, so the jury's eye lands where you point it. Drag a marquee around the source region and Evidentiary commits a 3× magnification, centers it in the viewport, caps it at 70% of each axis, and nudges it clear of any callout already on the page.

Drag the body to move it; the position commits about twenty times a second, so the jury display tracks the move smoothly instead of jumping at the end. Eight invisible handles surround the body for resizing, and the modifier decides what the drag means — read live, so you can change your mind mid-drag.

Double-click the body to delete it. Clicking the armed callout tool a second time opens the style popover — dim the rest of the page on or off, dim amount, border color, thickness, and corner radius — and every change applies live to both screens. In continuous scroll the source ring scrolls with the page while the blow-up stays anchored; on the side-by-side stage a blow-up can cross the divider between panes.

### Erase an annotation or remove a highlight

There are four ways to take a mark off the page.

• The eraser (E). Click or drag over a mark to remove it. Move grips hide while the eraser is armed so they do not fight over the same drag.
• Double-click a mark with any tool. This works for highlights, redactions, shapes, arrows, lines, freehand strokes, callouts, and measurements — the quickest way to remove a highlight you dragged somewhere you did not intend.
• Erase All. Right-click the eraser for Erase All Annotations on This Page and Erase All Annotations on Every Page. Both preserve redactions, and both record as a single undo step.
• ⇧E (Clear Annotations on Page). Removes every annotation on the focused page, including redactions, in one undoable step. In side-by-side it acts on the focused pane.

Warning: Erase All Annotations on Every Page clears the whole document's working marks in one action. It is undoable while the presenter is open, but not after the exhibit is closed. Snapshot first.

⌘Z undoes and ⌘⇧Z redoes, fifty steps deep — in side-by-side each pane keeps its own history and the menu commands target the focused pane. Committing a mark, moving one, rotating a page, both Erase All commands, ⇧E, restoring a snapshot, and moving or resizing a callout are all recorded. Publishing is not, and neither are keystrokes inside a text label — ⌘Z steps back to before the label existed, not through the characters. The stack clears when you turn the page, the same event that clears the departed page's marks.

Every committed mark carries a move grip, an arrows glyph in a black circle drawn on your canvas only — the jury never sees the grips. Dragging one is a pure move: position only, clamped to the page, one undo step on release.

### Toggles that change what the jury sees

Both persist across launches.

### Adjust Page

The last pill in the tool strip corrects a murky scan or a dark photograph, per page. A small orange dot on the button marks a page carrying a non-default adjustment.

Warning: This is not an operator preview. While any slider is off its default the popover posts "Adjusted — jury sees this view". The corrected image is what publishes, what the frozen Staged copy carries, and what a flattened export writes. Keep corrections to legibility, and be ready to state on the record that the exhibit was brightened. Reset returns the page to its original values, and adjustments are stored per page with the case, so unlike working annotations they survive closing and reopening the exhibit.

### Video on the jury display

Video exhibits play with the full transport described in Media, and the same annotation tools work on video on your side of the glass. Publishing mounts the video and starts playback; it stays live rather than freezing. Send Frame publishes a single frozen frame instead. Switching to Staged while a video is on the jury pauses it and holds the last frame, with a pill telling you that pressing Play resumes to the jury. Playing deposition designations to the jury is a mode of its own; see Playback Mode.

### Markup snapshots

Working annotations do not survive. Turning the page discards that page's marks, and closing an exhibit discards them all. A markup snapshot is the save action — a named copy of everything on the exhibit, with a preview of what you saw, stored inside the case package.

Save one with ⌘S (File ▸ Save Markup Snapshot…) or from the Snapshots menu in the presenter toolbar. The name is pre-filled from the exhibit number, page, and a revision counter, so repeated saves on the same page number themselves in order. Restore from the same menu or from the snapshot rows in the exhibits sidebar; restoring records an undo step first, so a mistaken restore is recoverable with ⌘Z while the presenter is open. After a restore, a camera-with-check button appears in the toolbar: Update Restored Snapshot folds your current marks back into that same snapshot rather than accumulating near-identical copies.

Note: Restoring grafts your current redactions onto the restored state. A snapshot taken before a redaction was applied cannot un-redact the page.

Annotate tonight, save the snapshot, restore it in front of the jury tomorrow. Naming snapshots for the moment they belong to — a witness name, a line of cross — makes them findable mid-examination, because Quick Search matches them by name. Managing snapshots from the sidebar is covered in Exhibits.

### Knowing you are presenting

Evidentiary reports the state of the jury display in four places simultaneously, so no single glance is load-bearing.

The summary names the most specific thing on the display — playing deposition clips, playing video, showing a named exhibit, or mirroring your screen — and VoiceOver announces the transitions. The menu-bar item's own menu switches modes and reports what is showing; it disappears the moment the jury display closes. The presentation control bar carries the remaining indicators: a JURY: status pill naming the mode or the exhibit, and a status line with a colored dot spelling the situation out in a sentence.

⇧P opens the Jury Preview panel, a small floating mirror of the jury display in the corner of your screen. It never takes focus, so it cannot steal a keystroke, and it stays visible even when Evidentiary is not frontmost. A badge and matching border report the mode — red BLACKOUT, green STAGED, navy LIVE. The badge is authoritative in every mode; the picture area mirrors still images rather than frame-accurate video, so to confirm exactly what the jury sees, use Copy Jury Image (⌘⇧C), which copies a bitmap of the current jury frame to the clipboard for the record.

Active modes badge. Whenever something other than plain staging is driving the courtroom — a designation list playing, an impeachment cued, a binder running — a badge appears in the title bar. Click it for a list of what is live, each with a one-click Exit, so nothing is ever running that you did not know about.

### Trial Mode

⌘⇧T (View ▸ Enter Trial Mode) is the trial-day lockdown. It auto-hides the Dock and the menu bar, clearing the operator's screen of everything that is not Evidentiary. They are auto-hidden rather than removed, so a deliberate cursor poke at the edge of the screen still summons either one — you can hand off or switch apps during a break without leaving Trial Mode. Exiting restores your Dock and menu-bar settings exactly as they were. A navy shield-check badge in the title bar shows Trial Mode is on; clicking it opens a popover that turns it off. Because the system menu bar is hidden, the jury-status menu-bar item goes with it, so the title-bar tint, the control bar, and the Jury Preview panel are the indicators to watch.

Warning: The quit guard is the only thing standing between a mistyped ⌘Q and a closed case in front of the jury. While Trial Mode is active, every route to termination — ⌘Q, the Dock menu, a logout — is intercepted with a confirmation. Enter Trial Mode before the jury is seated, not after the first near-miss. Trial Mode does not persist across launches; make entering it part of the trial-day routine.

### Pre-Trial Check

Help ▸ Pre-Trial Check… runs a courtroom preflight before you convene. Tick the checks you want, run them, and clear each finding as you resolve it — every finding names the exhibit, deposition, or playlist it points at. The checks cover exhibits missing an exhibit number or a source file, exhibits with no admission status, conditional admissions still to connect up, depositions missing a deponent name, a date taken, a transcript, or a video volume, designations with no time range, video and audio that this Mac cannot decode, cloud-synced files that have not finished downloading, and empty playlists.

The decode check opens every media exhibit in the case, so its running time scales with the amount of video. Run it the evening before, on the machine that will sit at counsel table. The footer also carries Test Pattern on Jury Display, because the check verifies the case, not the room — pair it with the test pattern and one real publish to the courtroom monitor before proceedings start.

Side-by-Side Compare

Put two exhibits at once on the jury display — the contract against the invoice, the photograph against the diagram, page 12 against page 13. Press \ to compare two documents side by side and \ again to leave. The presenter toolbar's Compare button opens the split screen too, with the staged exhibit already loaded on the left and the right pane empty. The stage is locked to your jury display's own proportions and split exactly down the middle, with letterbox bars filling whatever is left of the window. There is no draggable divider, on purpose: what you lay out is pixel-for-pixel what the courtroom gets.

### Entering and leaving

### Filling the panes

• Click a pane to focus it, then click any exhibit — or any page under an exhibit — in the sidebar and it loads into that pane.
• Drag an exhibit row from the sidebar straight onto the pane you want it in. A ring marks the target. Drops from the sidebar are accepted; files from Finder are not.
• Pick from the Exhibit dropdown at the top of each pane, which lists None plus every exhibit.
• ⇧N re-spreads at any time: the right pane takes the left pane's exhibit at the left pane's next page, however far the two have drifted apart.

An empty pane reads Select an Exhibit with a prompt to pick one from the dropdown above.

### Knowing which pane is which

Each pane keeps an identity color — teal on the left, purple on the right — and the same tint marks that exhibit's row in the sidebar. Focus decides which pane the shared toolbar, the rotate controls, the page field, and undo act on. Clicking or dragging in a pane focuses it and draws in the same gesture, so there is no separate click-to-focus step; the focused pane carries a thicker, brighter outline. Tab moves focus to the other side.

### The shared toolbar

One toolbar sits above both panes and drives whichever is focused.

Pick Highlight once and draw on either side. Each pane remembers its own color per tool, so the left pane's arrows can stay red while the right pane's are blue. A callout dragged across the divider paints over the neighboring page instead of being clipped at the seam. The controls that can only mean one page at a time — rotation, the page chevrons, the page-number field, undo and redo — act on the focused pane. Two-finger scroll pans whichever zoomed pane the cursor is over. Each pane also has its own compact top bar: the exhibit picker, first, previous, "N / M", next, last, a Publish button for that pane's marks, and pane-level undo and redo.

### Lock the pages while comparing

The lock button freezes the comparison. Every page control in both panes and in the shared toolbar goes quiet, drops onto panes are rejected, and ⇧N does nothing. Scrolling still pans within a zoomed pane but cannot page past the lock. A Pages locked banner on the stage says so while it is on, and choosing another exhibit leaves compare for single-page view rather than silently swapping a pane out from under you. The lock clears itself when you exit compare.

Use it once the comparison is exactly right — it prevents a stray arrow key or scroll from moving one side of an argument you are midway through making.

### Orientation

The orientation toggle flips the split between left and right and top and bottom; the stage stays locked to the jury monitor's proportions either way. A stacked split suits two landscape photographs, a wide spreadsheet, or a chart. Side-by-side suits portrait documents. The orientation is captured in a snapshot and restored with it.

### Publishing the split

The split stage publishes as a unit and is the first thing Publish looks for. In Staged, pressing ⏎ freezes the pair — both panes, both pages, all marks — and sends that frozen copy to the jury. In Live the split mirrors continuously, and in Blackout the jury display stays dark. Inside a pane, publishing is more immediate: the pane's own Publish button pushes all marks on that pane's page, and every page change in a pane publishes right away.

Note: Because panes mirror at the pane level, treat side-by-side as closer to Live than to Staged when you are turning pages. Blackout (B) is still the reliable way to work unobserved. Presenter Notes are single-view only and are not shown while the split stage is up.

### Snapshots

The camera button saves the whole comparison as one snapshot — both exhibits, both pages, every mark, and the orientation. It suggests a name built from both exhibits, lists under both of them in the sidebar and in Quick Search, and restores the entire side-by-side layout in one click, from either exhibit. The button is disabled until both panes are loaded. A split snapshot cannot be updated in place with Update with Current State; save a new one instead.

Depositions and Transcripts

The Depositions tab (⌘3) is where deposition video, transcripts, and sync data live. Each deposition is one row in the sidebar with its clip lists nested underneath, and clicking a row loads that transcript into the detail pane. Everything that binds a page:line citation to a moment of video starts here: once you sync a deposition transcript, clicking a line plays that testimony, a selection becomes a designation with real timecodes, and impeachment plays straight from a citation. Under each name the row shows the transcript's page range — pp. 1–256, pp. 257–500 — so a multi-volume witness with a missing stretch stands out at a glance. (A scanned PDF shows its range once it has been opened once.)

### Importing a deposition

Drag a deposition's whole folder onto the Depositions sidebar and it becomes one deposition: the videos, plus exactly one transcript source. The import reads the top level only and picks the transcript by priority — a .tws sync file first, then a sync .xml, then the .txt, then the .pdf. It needs exactly one file of the winning tier plus at least one video; anything else raises "Can't import folder" rather than guessing. Drop several folders at once for several depositions.

Loose files work too. A .tws or .xml each becomes its own deposition, and video, PDF, and TXT files dropped together form one combined deposition. Videos are natural-sorted, so Vol.01 lands ahead of Vol.02 and Vol.10 sorts after Vol.9.

Dropping onto an existing deposition row targets that deposition: a video is appended as a volume, a PDF or TXT becomes the transcript and auto-fills the deponent name and date from the cover page, and a .tws or .xml applies its sync.

The toolbar Add menu covers the rest.

When an imported .tws or sync XML references volumes the case does not have, a Missing Video Volumes alert offers Pick Videos… or Skip. A file that fails to import is named in the message; the usual cause is a cloud placeholder that has not downloaded yet.

### The deposition row

Rows sort alphabetically by the deponent's last name. Each carries four lines: the deponent name, the transcript file with a green check mark once the deposition is synced, the attached video volumes, and the deposition date plus the number of clip lists built from this witness. Drag the deposition icon out to pull a copy of the transcript into Finder. Hovering exposes Reveal in Finder, Edit, and Delete.

Expanding a row lists its clip lists, each with its designation count, running time, a green Play button when the list is playable, and a menu holding Edit Designations, Play All, and Delete List. Clip lists attached to no deposition collect in a Standalone Lists section at the bottom.

Warning: Delete List deletes immediately, with no confirmation.

Delete Deposition… asks which kind of delete you mean. Move to Exhibits removes the deposition record but leaves the transcript and video in the case as ordinary exhibits — the one to pick when a deposition was assembled wrong and you want to rebuild it from the pieces. Delete from Case removes the deposition *and* its transcript and video exhibits. Neither is undoable.

### The Edit Deposition sheet

The hover Edit button, the Edit Deposition… context item, and several imports all open the same sheet — the control panel for one deposition, saving every change as you make it. It runs through Deponent Information (name, date taken, the transcript volume number for a multi-day deposition rather than the count of video files, court reporter, case caption), Video Volumes, Audio, Smart Summary, Transcript, Transcript Sync, and operator-only Notes that never reach the jury display. The whole sheet is a drop target: videos append as volumes, a PDF or TXT replaces the transcript.

Volumes. Removing a volume leaves a placeholder in its slot rather than closing the gap. Sync entries and designations address video by volume index, so the placeholder is what keeps Volume 3 pointing at Volume 3 after Volume 2 is pulled. The Sync Report flags the empty slot.

Audio boost. Different videographers record at different levels. Auto measures this deposition's speech loudness and sets a boost so every deposition plays at the same standard level; the slider runs −6 to +18 dB by hand. The boost belongs to the deposition, so it applies in the clip editor, Playback Mode, the impeachment player, and exported video. Fix a quiet witness once.

Transcript. The section names the linked transcript file and tags it with its format — TXT, PDF, PDF (OCR) for a scan with no text layer, TWS or XML when the text was materialized from a sync file, or Generated for a speech-recognition transcript. There is no picker: drop a transcript on the deposition (or use the Import Deposition flow) to attach or replace one, and the deponent name and date auto-fill from the cover page. Convert PDF to TXT… writes the attached PDF out as a plain ASCII transcript; drop that TXT on the deposition to sync against it instead. ASCII transcripts import one-to-one and are the most reliable source for page:line accuracy; a scanned PDF is read with Vision OCR the first time it opens.

Translator Present. Check this before syncing testimony taken through an interpreter. The recognizer then aligns against the English portions and ignores the rest.

Run 2nd pass for added accuracy. Off by default. When checked, sync makes a second visit to the recording: it re-examines the stretches the first pass could not place, and it settles each matched line's ending against the audio itself. Both are refinements on top of an already-usable sync, and the second one reads the whole recording again — expect a long deposition to take substantially longer. Leave it off for everyday work; turn it on for testimony you are about to designate from, or when the timings came back rough.

### Syncing a deposition transcript

Syncing maps each transcript page:line to a moment in the video. The controls sit in the Transcript Sync section of the Edit Deposition sheet, and the whole pass runs on device — nothing is uploaded.

Auto-Sync (Speech) listens to the deposition audio and matches what it hears against the transcript text. It stays disabled until the deposition has at least one video volume and a transcript. While it runs you get a progress bar, a live elapsed timer, and Cancel; when it finishes, the sheet reports the run time, the accuracy, and how many lines aligned.

That accuracy figure is the fraction of *testimony* lines matched directly against the audio. Front matter (appearances) and back matter (certifications) are never spoken on the recording, so they are excluded rather than scored as failures. Read the Sync Report rather than the headline percentage — it names which stretches were interpolated. Three things move the match rate materially: an ASCII transcript instead of a scanned PDF, Translator Present on interpreted testimony, and Run 2nd pass for added accuracy when you can spare the extra time.

Edit Sync is the repair bench for stretches auto-sync got wrong — and, as Sync Manually, the from-scratch tool for audio speech recognition cannot handle. It works where the problem is visible: open the deposition's transcript and click Edit Sync in the header (the Edit Deposition sheet's button lands in the same place, and right-clicking a transcript line offers Fix Timing Here…). The mode docks a video-and-waveform preview under the toolbar, marks every estimated stretch amber in a health strip beside the scroll bar, and counts the spots to check in the bar — the chevrons, or N and P, jump straight to them.

The loop: click the line you want to fix — every click plays a two-second preview, and each row's chip shows its listed time. Jog with ←/→ (⇧ jogs 5 seconds, ⌥ a single frame) until the playhead sits where the line is really spoken, then press Return — the line pins there, and the lines between your pin and the nearest verified neighbor re-time to match. Verified lines never move: a fix stays inside the stretch that needed it. To re-time a whole passage in one pass, select its first line and press Space — playback starts at that line — then tap Return the moment each line is actually spoken: the time stamps, the next line arms itself, and the tape keeps rolling. ⌘Z takes back the last pin, clicking a pinned chip unpins it, and nothing touches the deposition until Apply — Cancel discards the whole session.

A never-synced transcript opens the same mode as Sync Manually: anchor the first spoken line, then the last, and every line between is spaced automatically — with as many extra anchors as the recording needs. A practical set: the start of testimony, after each break, and the start of each new volume.

Apply then offers to refine the stretches you fixed with speech recognition. Your anchors give the recognizer the one thing the original pass lacked — a tight, correct window — so it gets a second chance at the lines it missed. Lines it matches at full strength come back with word-accurate, verified times; anything it cannot match (colloquy never spoken on the video, unintelligible crosstalk) keeps your manual timing exactly as you set it, and your anchors never move.

When the audio will not decode. If sync fails on the audio itself, right-click the video exhibit → Optimize Video for Playback… re-encodes it to a clean H.264 MP4 without shifting clip times or sync. The Edit Deposition sheet offers Optimize All Volumes for a multi-volume deposition.

Word-level timings. Line-level sync is enough for whole-line designations; cutting mid-answer at a specific word needs per-word timings. A deposition synced without them shows a notice offering Add Word Timings, which re-runs the pass to capture them. Running it is safe — if the new pass matches worse, the existing line-level timings stay intact.

Warning: Clear throws the sync away. It is not undoable and there is no confirmation. Existing designations keep the times already stored on them, but everything that resolves a page:line on demand stops working until you re-sync: clicking a transcript line to play it, Impeach…, Play deposition range, making clips from a selection, and auto-filling times in the clip editor. Export the sync first if there is any chance of needing it back.

### Sync every deposition at once

Sync All Depositions… in the Add menu opens Batch Sync, which queues every deposition that has both a transcript and a video, with a completed counter, a failed counter, and one row per job.

Sync in Background starts the queue and closes the sheet — progress moves to a strip in the main window with a Show details link and a Cancel button, so a night's worth of depositions can sync while you work on exhibits. Move to Background does the same mid-run, and Include Already Synced re-queues the ones the queue skipped.

This is the night-before task: load the transcripts and video as the discovery drop lands, start the queue, and come back to a case that is ready to clip.

### Checking and repairing a sync

The Report button opens the sync health report. Nothing about it is stored — it is rebuilt from the deposition's current sync entries every time it opens, so it always reflects the latest manual edits, imports, and realigns. The header gives the accuracy, the matched and excluded line counts, and one line per volume showing how far the alignment reached. A clean sync reports no issues; otherwise you get findings, each with a severity, a page:line range, and guidance.

Each category caps at 20 findings and says so when it overflows — that many usually means the sync itself failed, and re-running Auto-Sync beats triaging line by line. Copy Report puts a plain-text version on the clipboard, written to be dropped into an email to the videographer or the court reporter.

"Interpolated" means a line's timing was estimated from its neighbors rather than heard. Those lines still play, but their endpoints drift, and in the transcript they carry an amber strip down the left edge. Listen to any clip cut inside one before it goes to the jury.

### Realign the transcript page numbers

Court reporters and litigation-support vendors do not always agree on where page numbering starts, so a transcript sometimes parses a page or two out of register — a cover sheet counted, an errata page missed. Right-click any transcript line → Realign Page/Line…, type what that line *should* be (a colon, a space, or a dash all parse), and every line is renumbered by the same offset, with 25 lines to a page preserved. The sheet shows the current offset when one is in effect, and Reset Realignment puts it back.

Sync data is stored in the transcript's raw coordinates and converted for display, so a realign never invalidates a sync: the report, the transcript rows, and the volume markers all pick up the new numbering with no re-sync required.

Warning: Designations are the exception. A clip stores the page:line that was displayed when it was cut. Change the offset after clips exist and those clips keep citing their original numbers — they still play the right testimony, but the printed citation no longer matches the renumbered transcript. Realign first, designate second.

### Transcribe a video when there is no transcript

When a deposition has video but no transcript attached, the Edit Deposition sheet offers Generate Transcript (AI), which transcribes the video's audio on device so clip work can start before the certified transcript arrives. Every volume's file has to be locatable.

Warning: A generated transcript is speech-recognition output, not a certified record. It is labeled machine-generated everywhere it appears, and the transcript viewer carries a standing banner. Do not read from, cite, or publish it as though it were the certified record. Syncing the real transcript later replaces it automatically.

The speaker guess on a machine transcript is exactly that — a guess drawn from oath context and question density. When it lands backwards, right-click any line → Swap Q and A Speakers flips every Q. and A. in one pass, in the sync entries and in the text file on disk. Run it once from any row; the change is transcript-wide.

### Reading the transcript

The transcript view shows the deposition with page:line numbering at whatever text size suits the room — the header control steps 10% at a time between 0.8× and 2.0×, and the scale is remembered across cases and launches. The Page field jumps to a page on ⏎.

Search walks hits in place rather than filtering: type two characters or more, ⏎ or ⌘G for the next hit, ⇧⌘G for the previous, both wrapping. ⌘F focuses the field. To search every transcript in the case at once, use Global Transcript Search (⇧⌘F) — see Quick Search and the Command Palette.

Rows carry their own marks: a navy PAGE N capsule at each page break, a green VOL. N capsule with a film icon where a new video volume begins, an amber strip on lines whose timing was interpolated, and a wash on search hits.

An image-only transcript PDF is recognized with Vision the first time you open it, behind a progress HUD — once only, since the result is cached with the case. If a file cannot be parsed into a page:line transcript at all, Evidentiary says so and keeps it as an ordinary exhibit; ask the court reporter for an ASCII .txt, and failing that a text-based rather than scanned PDF.

### Selecting testimony

Selection works at two grains. Click a line's page:line gutter to select the whole line, then click a second gutter to extend. Click a *word* and shift-click another word to trim the selection to those words. Whole-line selections tint in the accent color; word-level selections tint purple, with a stronger tint on the anchor word, so the grain of what you have is visible at a glance.

A bar along the bottom names the range — Selected 24:16 — 24:19 (partial: word 5 → word 4) — with a Clear button. Everything that acts on testimony reads that selection: Impeach…, Impeach with Text Only, Create Clip into a new list or an existing one, Copy, and Copy with Citation. A selection that crosses a video volume boundary is split per volume when a clip is cut, so each designation addresses a single video file.

### Copy testimony with a citation

Right-click testimony → Copy puts the text on the clipboard. Copy with Citation adds the short-form cite built from the deponent and the range — "(Smith Dep. 12:5–13:2)" — which is the form to drop into a brief, a motion in limine, or an email to opposing counsel. Both respect partial-line boundaries: a selection that starts mid-answer copies from the selected word, not from the start of the line.

### Summarize a deposition

On Macs with Apple Intelligence, the Edit Deposition sheet carries a Smart Summary section that reads a synced transcript on device and returns topic cards: what the witness was examined about, a short summary of each topic, and the page:line references that support it. Generate Topic Summary… stays disabled until the deposition is synced.

Clicking a reference row opens a popover with five lines of context on either side of the citation, the range that would be clipped (the cited line plus or minus two lines), and an Add to Clip List menu naming every candidate list. An entry added that way records its source deposition, fills its video times from the sync, keeps the cited snippet in its notes, and splits if the range crosses a volume boundary. From there it behaves like any other designation.

A search row above the cards filters across titles, summaries, and quoted snippets — the fastest way to find where a term was covered. Summaries are cached, so reopening the window is instant; Regenerate runs the model again, worth doing after a re-sync, since the cache does not invalidate on its own. Treat it as triage for finding the testimony worth designating, not a substitute for reading the transcript.

### Housekeeping

Export Depo Report… in the Add menu writes a CSV inventory of the video depositions — date synced, deponent (surname first), deposition date, and total length read from the video files themselves. It is the file to hand a trial coordinator who needs a running total of video time by witness.

Organize Files into Deponent Folders appears when a case has deposition media sitting loose, and moves each deposition's video and transcript into a per-deponent folder under *Depositions*, leaving trial exhibits where they are. If a deposition's name or date imported wrong, right-click it → Re-detect Name & Date re-runs cover-page extraction and overwrites both fields.

### Moving sync data between cases and apps

Right-click a deposition → Export Sync or Import Sync. Evidentiary's own .tws format keeps everything, word-level timing and edited captions included, and is the round-trip format between Evidentiary users. Sync XML follows the onCue schema and is the format to hand third-party trial-presentation software. A .tws import fills deponent metadata only where the existing fields are blank; a sync XML import also attaches any videos it can match by filename.

Warning: Importing sync replaces the deposition's existing sync data completely. There is no merge and no undo. Export the current sync first if it may still be needed.

The Clip Editor

The clip editor is where you create video clips from a deposition — cut, timed, labeled, reviewed, and made ready for the jury. Open a designation list to enter it (Create Clip at the top of the Clips & Playlists panel starts a new one), and it opens as its own window: toolbar, timeline, video preview and waveform, add bar, and clip list down the left, the deposition's transcript down the right. A list created without a witness starts empty — pick one from its Choose Deposition menu, also centered in the toolbar, to load the transcript and video.

### The window

The editor is a floating window, so it is exempt from the app's global hotkeys: its own handlers own J/K/L, I/O, N/P, Space, and the arrow keys while it has focus. The playhead is saved to the deposition when the window closes and restored the next time you open the editor on that witness.

The deposition picker in the center of the toolbar shows which depositions are already on this list and adds any other in the case — the first added becomes the primary, the rest secondaries — which is how one list carries several witnesses' testimony. Only the focused deposition's clips can have their times edited; the rest show their IN and OUT buttons disabled until you switch to them. ⌘⌥0 shows and hides the transcript pane.

Warning: Remove This Deposition also deletes every clip in the list belonging to that deposition. Copy those clips to another list first if you need them.

### Creating clips

There are four ways in, and they all end up in the same list.

• Select transcript lines and press ⌘↩, or use Create Clip in the selection bar or on the row right-click menu (Create as… picks the party at the same time).
• Type a page:line range into the add bar's four fields, pick a party, and press Add or Add Counter. Times auto-fill from the sync data, and an exhibit is auto-linked if the transcript carries an exhibit marker inside the range.
• Press Add at Current Time for a 30-second clip starting at the playhead, with its page:line derived from the sync.
• Mark I and O during playback.

Clicking any word in the transcript plays from that word.

Partial-line clips. When a selection's start or end falls inside a line, a Partial Clip sheet asks how the trimmed excerpt should read: capitalize the first word or preface it with an ellipsis, and close it with a period, a question mark, or an ellipsis, with a live preview. Cancel abandons the creation rather than leaving a half-made clip behind.

Volume crossings. A range that crosses a video-volume boundary — however you enter it — splits automatically into one clip per volume, and the pieces are linked, so the whole designation plays as one run and exports as one file. Right-click → Unlink separates them.

On Macs with Apple Intelligence, the sparkles button on a clip row proposes a short label from that clip's testimony, on device, into its notes. Suggest All Labels in the overflow menu does the same for every note-less clip of the focused deposition in one pass, behind a banner you can stop at any point.

### Paste a designation list

The fastest way in from paper. The Mass add button in the add bar opens a window with a paste box on the left and a live validation column on the right — one row per line, checked as you type.

Several ranges on one line import as a single linked clip. Insert Party and Insert Deponent write those header lines for you, so one paste can mix parties and designate several witnesses' testimony into the same list, each range validated against its own transcript. Multi-volume witnesses need no headers at all: a range whose pages fall outside the current volume but inside exactly one other volume of the same deponent is routed there automatically (the row says so), and Apply brings that volume — and its video — into the list. The target deposition is named at the top of the window.

A backwards range, a range past the end of the transcript, and a line that is not a range in any accepted form are errors, and are skipped on apply. An overlap with an existing designation, a range with no video time yet, a range that does not begin with Q. or A., and a header naming a party or deposition the case does not have are warnings, and import anyway. Trailing text the parser cannot read is kept in the clip's notes rather than dropped silently. The footer holds a default party for rows above any header, Sort by Page and Line, and Merge page to page, which joins consecutive page-to-page ranges only when they belong to the same party.

Warning: The paste box is pre-seeded with the list's current designations, and Apply replaces the whole list — ranges in the list but not in the box are dropped. Edit the seeded text rather than replacing it wholesale unless a full substitution is what you want.

### Importing a highlighted PDF

A designation list served as a highlighted transcript PDF imports directly: drop it on the clip editor window, on the clip list, or on the Mass Add window. Highlights are read as quads and matched against the transcript text, which is what lets word-level trims carry into the clips instead of rounding everything to whole lines.

Mass Add then shows a card with one row per highlight color and a party picker beside it — defaults assigned by hue, yellows to plaintiff, blues to defense, greens to the court — plus how many clips start or stop mid-line and how many highlights were skipped. Highlights over page numbers, headers, and footers are skipped by design, so a skip count roughly equal to the page count means the highlighter swept the margins, not that the import failed.

### Refining clips

Every clip row shows its ordinal, range, party, IN and OUT times, objection state, include state, and notes. One click on the page:line opens four fields to edit it in place; they commit on ⏎ and re-derive the clip's times from the sync data.

The waveform. Selecting a clip auto-zooms the waveform to it, so you can see exactly where the audio in and out points sit. Click to seek. Drag the IN or OUT marker to move that boundary — it snaps to the nearest sync-line boundary within half a second, and the change is written on release. Show full waveform returns to the whole volume.

The transport. The play button plays from the playhead and stops at the clip's OUT, which is how you audition a clip as the jury will see it; with no clip selected it just plays. Around it sit a speed menu and IN and OUT stamps at the playhead (⌥-click either to snap to the nearest word boundary). Right-click → Auto-Fill Times re-derives one clip's times from the sync data.

Badges to read. A partial-line badge names the trimmed words. An objection badge lists categories detected in the testimony — "Form", "Hearsay" — and says outright that they are auto-detected and need verifying; they are heuristics to check, not rulings. A low-confidence badge counts the lines with estimated sync timing, and disappears once the clip is QC-verified. On a multi-witness list, a capsule names each clip's source deponent.

The timeline. Above the video, a timeline draws designations in their party color, counter-designations in the lane below, and sustained clips in red dashes, with a summary bar counting gaps, overlaps, and total runtime. Tap a bar to open that clip and mount its volume, or empty canvas to seek.

Undo. ⌘Z and the Undo/Redo buttons hold full-list snapshots — adds, splits, merges, deletes, reorders, batch operations, a whole Auto QC pass, a Mass Add apply. The stack is session-scoped and discarded when the window closes.

### Splitting, merging, and excising

Right-click a clip → Split at Playhead cuts it in two where the video is sitting; Merge with Next joins it to the clip below and joins their notes. In the transcript, right-click a line inside a clip for Split Clip Above This Line (this line starts a new clip) or Split Clip Below This Line (this line stays put, the next one starts the new clip).

Select lines in the middle of a designated passage and Remove Lines from Clip cuts them out — what is left stays designated as two clips around the hole, which is what a sustained objection in the middle of an answer usually calls for.

Sort by Page:Line in the bottom bar reorders the whole list into transcript order and renumbers it. Worth doing before any export: file names, the reports, and the Keynote deck all follow list order.

### Linking clips

Check the boxes on two or more adjacent clips and Link combines them into one linked clip. A linked run exports as a single file, counts as one clip in every total, moves as a unit when dragged, and collapses into one row with a chevron to expand its members. Use it for testimony that has to play as one uninterrupted excerpt — a question and its answer split across a page break.

The batch bar that appears with any checkbox selection also holds Copy, Cut, Set Party, Set Objection, Include, Exclude, counter on and off, and Delete. Every batch action is recorded as a single undo snapshot.

### What plays, and what doesn't

Three per-clip states decide whether a clip reaches the jury, and the list makes each one visible at a glance.

• Include in Playback / Exclude from Playback — the switch for a clip you want to keep in the list but not play. Excluded rows render at half opacity.
• Mark as Counter-Designation — tags the clip as the other side's, badged *counter* in the list and in the playback queue.
• Set Objection — none, pending (yellow), sustained (red), or overruled (green). A sustained clip is skipped by every playback path and by every export; pending and overruled play normally, and List Check flags anything still pending before you walk into court.

The counters beside the add bar report the clip count, the total runtime excluding sustained clips, the counter-designations, and the sustained clips in red.

Warning: Deleting a clip raises no confirmation dialog. The five-second Undo toast and ⌘Z are the only recovery paths, and both die when the window closes.

### Parties

Every clip carries a party, colored down the left edge of its row and into the timeline lanes. Manage Parties names the parties in your case and picks each one's color, so a mixed list reads as Plaintiff / Defendant / Cross at a glance. Each party's stored identifier — its name lowercased with underscores — is what a [Party: …] header in Mass Add matches against, and what a .dce exchange carries. Set Party on a right-click assigns one, or several selected at once.

### Batch cleanup

The More clip operations menu runs list-wide fixes, each recorded as one undo snapshot.

Auto-Fill Times in the bottom bar is the narrower tool: it fills clips that have no times at all, from the primary deposition's sync.

### Copy and paste

Clips cut, copy, and paste like text — within a list, between lists, between depositions, and between editor windows, on an app-wide clipboard that lasts for the session. A pasted clip keeps everything: times, range, party, include state, notes, counter flag, objection, linked exhibit with its page and snapshot, video corner, clear markers, and word-level trims. It keeps playing its original video, and a foreign deposition is registered as a secondary on the destination list. Revision marks deliberately do not travel, so a copy never inherits another list's review state. Right-click a list to copy or paste all of its designations at once; dragging entries onto a different list is a true move, not a copy.

A list from other software arrives as its own file: Import Clip List (.dce)… on the Clips & Playlists Add menu reads it and opens it in the editor, resolving each clip's deposition by identifier, then by name and volume, then by name alone, and stopping with a clear message when it cannot. Implausible page and line numbers are skipped rather than imported as broken clips, and ranges that straddle a volume boundary are split.

### Subtitles on clips

Captions come from the clip list, not from the raw transcript, and what you set here carries into playback, onto the jury display, and into burned-in exports alike.

Rewriting one caption line. Right-click a transcript line → Edit Subtitle Text… to override what the caption *says* without touching the transcript: retype the line, or leave it blank to drop it from the captions entirely. The same window turns individual words into highlights — tap the word chips, pick a highlight color and a text color, and those words render emphasized as the subtitle scrolls. The override travels into playback, the jury display, exported video, and the Clip Report, where emphasized words print bold on yellow. The transcript row gains a pencil badge, and Reset Subtitle to Original undoes it. Use it for the mis-transcribed word everyone in the room can hear, and for putting the emphasis where your argument is.

Find & Replace Captions (the arrows button in the transcript search bar) fixes a recurring transcription error across every caption in the deposition in one pass, with whole-word and case-sensitive options, and without changing the verbatim transcript or any report drawn from it.

Caption styling. The Caption styling… button on the transport opens the Subtitle Style window — the same controls as Settings ▸ Captions. It sets caption font size, the page:line stamp size as a fraction of it, background opacity, whether the current line is bold, and whether captions scroll smoothly or jump. The same panel sets the trim padding — the breathing room left around a clip once Tighten Clips trims silence away. Every caption setting applies wherever captions render — the editor preview, the impeachment player, the jury display, and exported video — and applies live, including to a jury display that is currently broadcasting, so set it during setup or between witnesses rather than mid-block.

### Linked exhibits

Link Exhibit to Selection… attaches a document to a passage of testimony: while those lines play, the exhibit fills the jury screen and the video shrinks into a corner. The popover picks the exhibit, the page, and which markup snapshot to show — current annotations, or any saved snapshot — plus the video corner, or Hide video overlay for document-only.

A linked run draws a span bar down the left edge of the transcript, covering every line the document is actually up for. It starts on the line that links the exhibit and runs until another link replaces it or a clear marker takes it down — not to the link's own end line, because playback keeps an exhibit on the jury display past the range it was attached to. The linking line carries a brighter cap, so two exhibits linked back to back read as two spans rather than one.

Right-click inside a linked run to change the Video Position, to End Exhibit Here so the link stops at that line, or to Remove Entire Exhibit Link. Clear Document Here plants the opposite marker: at that line the document comes off and the video goes back to full screen. Each clip row summarizes how many links and clears it carries.

The toolbar's linked-document button hides every link for the whole list in one click — red for hidden, cyan for shown — which is the fast way to run a designation without its documents when the court has not admitted them yet. Exports honor links only when Include linked documents is on.

### The transcript pane

The right pane is the same transcript, synchronized to the video, with three toggles that are off by default and remembered once set: speaker badges puts a Q, an A, a C for court personnel, or a named attorney's surname beside each line; exhibit mentions flags the lines where an exhibit is marked for identification or admitted; and sync confidence highlights the lines whose timing was interpolated rather than matched.

Rows carry their own decoration: a silence capsule on gaps of five seconds or more, a Vol. N capsule where a new video file starts, a timestamp that turns orange when interpolated, a pencil where the subtitle was edited, and a highlighter where words were emphasized. Designated words wash in the owning party's color, so you can see what is already cut while you read.

### Find testimony about anything

The sparkle toggle in the transcript search bar switches search from words to meaning: type "brake maintenance schedule" and up to five ranked testimony passages appear with their page:line ranges. Click one to select it, ⌘↩ to designate it.

### QC Review

The QC button steps through unverified clips and auditions each endpoint — your pick of 3, 5, or 10 seconds at the IN and the same into the OUT, right in the review banner. ↩ marks a clip good and advances, R replays, ↓ skips, ⎋ ends the review. The button is orange while any clip still needs QC and green once every clip is signed off.

Auto QC listens for you instead. It runs speech recognition over each unverified clip's IN and OUT windows and compares what it hears against the designated words: endpoints that land correctly are confirmed, endpoints that are off are moved to the right place, and endpoints it cannot judge get a ⚠ badge naming the reason, such as "IN is 4.2 s from the designated words — check the sync here". It reports verified, fixed, to-check, and skipped counts at the end. The whole pass is one undo snapshot, so ⌘Z reverses every moved endpoint in a single step. It works on the focused deposition's clips only.

When the pass finishes — or you stop it — a dialog totals the run: how many clips were resolved (confirmed as-is or corrected) and how many still need a look. Flagged clips keep their ⚠ reason in the list.

Verified clips wear a green check and a green wash on the row. The check clears itself if the clip is edited afterward, so a stale checkmark is impossible.

### List Check

The shield button runs a read-only lint over the list before court; it reports and never changes anything. It finds video exhibits missing from the case and video files missing from disk, clips with no times, objections not yet ruled on, sustained clips that will be skipped, clips a revision marked removed but left included, missing linked exhibits, overlapping time ranges, IN or OUT points that cut into a word, lines with estimated sync timing, and how many clips are not QC-verified. Each finding carries guidance and a Show button that selects the offending clip behind the popup. Excluded clips are not linted, so excluding a clip is a legitimate way to clear a finding.

### Revisions

When an amended list arrives, Mass Revise (the ± button beside Mass Add) handles the whole revision in one pass: paste the struck ranges into the REMOVE box and the new ranges into the ADD box — both understand the same forms as Mass Add. Removes run first, then adds. Every input line produces a preview row naming exactly what will happen — a clip deleted, trimmed, split in two, changed, absorbed into an added range, or created new — with a summary counting each kind before anything is touched.

By default the revision applies to a copy of the list, with each change badged Added, Changed, or Removed for review. A checkbox edits the original in place instead, behind a confirmation that spells out the damage.

Warning: An in-place Mass Revise cannot be undone by ⌘Z or by anything else. It is the one operation in the editor with no recovery path. Leave the revision checkbox on unless you have a copy of the list or a .dce export to fall back on.

A list carrying revision marks shows a review banner with the change counts, an Export Report… button for a PDF of the changes, and Accept Revision, which clears the marks and permanently deletes the struck clips (undoable, but only until the window closes). Add Revision on a clip list's context menu clones the list and files it under the source, which is how to preserve the served-on-date version. Compare Revisions on the Clips & Playlists toolbar puts any two lists side by side with every add, trim, and strike marked, and exports a PDF of the changes only or every row. Rows are matched by start page:line, and only a user-meaningful difference counts as modified — re-running Sync Times on one side does not flag every clip as changed.

### Playback keys

Space plays and pauses. J and L jog reverse and forward through 1×, 2×, 4×, and 8×; K hard-pauses. Arrows step a frame, ⇧-arrows a second, Home and End jump to the ends of the volume. I and O mark in and out at the playhead, ⌘↩ creates a designation from the selection, and ⎋ clears it. N and P jump to the next and previous designation, ↑ and ↓ select the previous and next clip, ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ reorder. ⌘F focuses transcript search; ⌘⌥0 shows and hides the transcript pane. The full map is under the ? button. Every handler bails while a search or text field has focus, so you can type "J" into a search without jogging the video.

### Playing the list

Play All on the toolbar runs every included, timed designation straight onto the jury display, driven by a bar in the workspace. When you want a queue in front of you, a transport you can stop between clips, and switches for what the courtroom sees, use Playback Mode — the next chapter.

### Exports

The Export button opens one popup covering everything the list can produce. Video exports as separate MP4s (one per clip, a linked run counting as one) or as one combined file, at 480p through original resolution, with a progress strip under the toolbar tracking the run.

Burn subtitles into video burns the captions permanently into the picture, following the clip list — per-line overrides, word emphasis colors, and the results of Find & Replace Captions all appear. Show page:line in subtitles adds the stamp, and is reachable only while burn-in is on. Include linked documents burns each clip's linked exhibit in jury style, the document full-frame with the video in its corner, honoring hide-video links and clear markers.

Warning: Burned captions cannot be turned off downstream. There is no separate caption track — the text is part of the picture, so the court, opposing counsel, and any third-party playback system receive it permanently. Use the Courtroom preset when the file needs to be clean.

Smaller files (HEVC/H.265) roughly halves size at the same quality but can fail to play on older Windows PCs and third-party systems, so every courtroom preset leaves it off. Right-click a single clip → Export Clip as Video… writes just that clip, pre-named to match the batch pattern, so a re-cut replacement drops straight into a folder you have already delivered.

Clips that are excluded, sustained, or missing times are skipped by the exporter — run List Check first to see which. The report formats, the export presets, and the exchange files are covered in Reports and Exports.

Playback Mode

Right-click a clip list → Play in Playback Mode to play a clip list for the jury end to end, from an attorney-side window built to drive it: the queue down the left, the video and its captions in the middle, the linked exhibit on the right, and a row of switches across the top deciding exactly what leaves your screen. It is the review room the night before and the console you run the designations from in court. The item is disabled unless the list is playable — it needs a primary deposition and at least one clip that is included, time-coded, and not sustained.

### The window

The header names the list, its deponent, the clip count, and the total running time. Down the left is the queue — every playable clip in order, numbered, with its page:line range, its length, a *counter* tag where one applies, and a document icon on the clips that carry a linked exhibit. Multi-witness lists badge each row with the deponent it came from. Double-click any row to jump there; the current clip stays highlighted and the queue scrolls to keep it centered. Hide Queue gives the video the whole window.

Under the video runs the same synced caption band the jury gets, page:line stamps and all — and it is clipped to the designation. Lines from before the clip's first word, or after its last, never appear, on your screen or theirs. Two progress bars track Clip and Session, so you always know both how far into this clip you are and how much of the day's designations remain.

Only clips that are included, time-coded, and not sustained are queued — the queue is the truth of what will play. If nothing qualifies, the window says so instead of opening empty; run Check List in the clip editor to see which clips are disqualified. A deposition with no video attached reports that instead, and the fix is a volume in the Edit Deposition sheet.

Unlike the clip editor and the impeachment player, this is an ordinary window rather than a floating one, so the app's global keys still work over it.

### Transport

Previous, play/pause, stop, and next; playback speed from 0.5× to 2×; and a Volume popover holding that deposition's audio boost, −6 to +18 dB. The boost belongs to the deposition, not the session — it persists between launches and applies to exports too. On a list mixing several witnesses it follows the deposition the current clip belongs to, so setting the level on one witness does not change the next.

Stop returns to the top of the list. Clips advance on their own, and a designation that crosses a video volume — or a list that designates several witnesses — swaps volumes and depositions without you doing a thing.

### Broadcast designations to the jury display

Broadcast sends the running playback to the jury display, opening the jury window first if it is not up yet. The title bar takes the red presenting tint and the summary reads "Playing deposition clips". Stop Broadcast puts the jury back on whatever it was showing before. Closing the playback window ends the broadcast too, and Esc on the jury side stops it from anywhere. Broadcast is an explicit send, so it lifts a blackout if one is on — and blackout, in turn, stops a running broadcast, exactly like it stops everything else. The two are never on at once, so the presenting indicator can always be believed.

What the courtroom sees depends on the clip. With no linked exhibit, the video fills the screen with the caption band beneath it. With a linked exhibit, the document fills the screen and the video shrinks into the corner that clip specifies, its captions tucked underneath. The jury never sees the queue, the progress bars, or your exhibit panel, and page:line reaches them only when the Page #s switch is on.

### The five toggles

Five pills sit along the header — green for on, red for off. They gate the jury feed only; your own window keeps showing everything, including page:line, so you can always see what you are about to turn back on.

The chain link between Video and Audio couples them, so one click blanks the picture and cuts the sound together — the objection button. Break the chain and they move independently.

Warning: Audio mutes the shared player, so muting takes your sound as well as theirs. When you need to cut the picture but keep listening, break the link and use Video alone.

### Resume where you left off in a designation list

Playback Mode remembers your place in every list, so a long designation block can be worked through across several sittings. With Auto-resume where you left off on (Settings ▸ General) it bookmarks the start of each clip as it begins, and reopening the list picks up at the clip you were on, silently — an ordinary quit and a crash both resume from the same place. With it off, opening a bookmarked list asks first: Resume loads at the bookmarked clip and time, Start from Beginning clears the bookmark. Neither starts playback; press Play when you are ready.

Closing the window offers to save the spot, and that alert intercepts both the Close button and the red window button, so a spot cannot be lost by closing the window the ordinary way.

### The exhibit panel

When the playing clip has a linked exhibit, a panel beside the video shows that exhibit's page. The button in its header pops it out into its own window with no controls — park that on a second monitor and keep the video and the controls in front of you. The panel is yours alone; what the jury sees is governed by the Document switch.

### The designation playback bar

A list can also play without opening Playback Mode at all. The green Play button on a clip-list row in the Depositions tab and Play All in the clip editor both run the list straight to the jury display, driven by a bar in the workspace: the party color and label, the list name, the clip position, elapsed, total and remaining time with what plays next, a subtitles toggle, a caption-style button, and previous, play/pause, next, and stop. N advances, P returns to the previous designation, and Esc stops designation playback.

Choose the bar for a short block you are driving between questions, and Playback Mode for a long block where you want the queue, the exhibit panel, the switches, and a bookmark.

Impeachment Player

To impeach a witness with their deposition, select the testimony in the transcript and run Impeach… — from the button in the transcript header, from the row right-click menu, or from the transcript background. A dedicated player opens with the clip cued, live page:line captions, and its own transport, independent of whatever the jury display is doing until you choose to show it. The window title names the deponent and the range, and opening it records the impeachment in the presentation history even though no clip was saved.

### The controls

Its controls are the ones you want with a witness on the stand: Replay runs the range again from the top, Loop keeps it running while you make the point, plus a speed menu, a scrubber, and Send to Jury — nothing reaches the courtroom until you press that, and it stays disabled while the jury display is closed.

Playback pauses on its own at the end of the range unless Loop is on, and the clip is not unloaded, so Replay restarts instantly. The deposition's audio boost is applied before the first frame. The scrub bar previews locally while you drag and commits the seek only on release, so scrubbing never throws stray frames onto the jury display. A selection that crosses a volume boundary plays straight through the seam.

The window is a floating editor window and owns its keys: Space plays and pauses, K hard-pauses, L and J jog forward and reverse, arrows step a frame, ⇧-arrows a second, and ⎋ closes. Workspace shortcuts — publish, blackout, tab switching — do not fire while it has focus; click the main window first to use them.

Warning: Closing the player does not clear the jury display. If Send to Jury was used, the jury keeps showing the stream, frozen on the last frame. Cut the feed with Blackout (⌘⇧B) or publish other content before you close the window.

If Impeach… beeps and nothing opens, the deposition is missing one of the three things it needs: a sync, a resolvable time range, or an attached video. Check the sync report and the volume list — see Depositions and Transcripts.

### Text-only impeachment

Prefer the words to the video? Impeach with Text Only, on the same right-click menu, puts the selected testimony itself on the jury display — a white card with the quote and a deponent, date, and page:line cite along the bottom. It needs no video and no sync, so it works on any transcript, which makes it the fallback for a stenographic-only deposition and for reading testimony into the record.

While the card is up, a red IMPEACHMENT chip in the presentation control bar and a stop row in the Workspace Modes badge both end it, and ending it restores whatever the jury display was showing beforehand. Blackout, closing the jury display, and starting designation playback all end it automatically. The command beeps and does nothing when the jury display is closed or in Blackout.

### A citation from the bench

When the exhibit open in the presenter *is* a synced deposition transcript, the presenter toolbar carries a Play deposition range button. It asks for a start page, a start line, an end page, and an end line, then plays that range on the jury display without leaving the document. That is the path to use when a citation arrives verbally — from the bench or from opposing counsel — and the right witness is already on screen.

Scanning a clip's barcode also plays that designation through the impeachment player — see QR / Barcode Recall.

Playlists and Binders

Two organizing surfaces sit beside the evidence. Playlists are ordered runs of exhibits — build a playlist tonight and step through tomorrow's direct in the order you planned it. Binders are folders of shortcuts to anything in the case: exhibits opened at a specific page, and clip lists, each carrying attorney-only notes. Make a witness binder for a deponent, a binder for a motion, a binder for a trial day. Binders live on the fifth sidebar tab (⌘5); playlists live under Exhibit Playlists in the Clips & Playlists tab. Nothing is copied into either one. Both point at evidence that already lives in the case, so deleting a row removes the shortcut and leaves the exhibit where it was.

### Build a playlist

Open the Clips & Playlists tab and choose Add ▸ New Exhibit Playlist…, then name it. Selecting the playlist opens its detail pane, where Add at the bottom opens the Add Exhibits sheet: multi-select rows showing each exhibit's type icon, number capsule, name, page count or "Audio", and its admission label in green, amber, or red. Select All and Select None sit in the footer beside a running "N selected" count; Add Selected commits.

Exhibits can also be pushed into a playlist from the Exhibits tab. The Add to Playlist picker on an exhibit's context menu lists every existing playlist plus a New Playlist name field with Create & Add, so a playlist can be started from the exhibit you happen to be looking at.

Playlists queue exhibits only: documents, video, audio. Deposition designations queue through clip lists instead, covered in The Clip Editor and Playback Mode.

### Make a witness binder

The Witness Binder menu in the Binders toolbar lists every deposition in the case, and appears only once the case has one. Pick a deponent and Evidentiary assembles a folder named "⟨Witness⟩ — Witness Binder" holding that deposition's transcript, every clip list built from it, and every exhibit those clips link — de-duplicated and ordered by exhibit number. It is the fastest way to walk into a cross with one folder that has everything the witness touched.

Note: The result is a snapshot, not a live view. Linking another exhibit to a clip after the binder is built does not update the binder. Run Witness Binder again for that deponent to assemble a current copy.

### Build a binder by hand

New Folder in the bottom toolbar creates "Folder N" and selects it with no name prompt — rename it later from the hover control or the context menu. With a folder selected, Add Item opens a popover titled "Add Item to ⟨folder⟩".

Dragging is usually faster than the popover.

Dragging over the Binders tab button for a moment springs the tab open so you can continue the drag into a folder. The tab button itself never takes the drop — it is a waypoint.

Binder membership can also be set from wherever the evidence lives: Add to Binder on a single exhibit's context menu, Binder on the multi-selection action bar, and Add to Binder on a clip set's context menu all offer New Folder… plus every existing folder. The Exhibit Info inspector (⌥⌘I) has a read-only Binders section listing the folders an exhibit belongs to.

### Working a binder

A folder row carries an expansion chevron, a folder icon, the name, and an item count. Right-click it for Rename…, Folder Color (ten choices), Set as Target Notebook, and Delete. Color is worth using — a red folder for the motion binder and a blue one for tomorrow's witness reads faster than names do under pressure.

Clicking an exhibit item opens that exhibit at its bookmarked page, and items with notes carry a notebook badge. If the underlying evidence has been deleted from the case, the row reads "Missing exhibit" or "Missing clip list" in red rather than failing silently.

Note: Deleting a folder or an item removes the binder entry only. The exhibits and clip lists it pointed at stay in the case.

The Binders sidebar has a Finder-style keyboard cursor: ↑ and ↓ step through folders, then items, then expanded pages; → expands or dives in; ← collapses. Focusing an exhibit item opens it in the detail pane, but clip-list items deliberately do not auto-open, so arrowing past one will not throw a clip editor window on screen mid-examination. Press ⏎ or click when you want it. A button at the top of the panel switches between Detailed View (rows with page thumbnails) and List View (compact text); the label names the mode you are switching to. Binders default to the compact list, stored separately from the Exhibits sidebar's setting.

### Presenting a binder

Present sits next to Add Item and steps through the selected folder in item order, sending each item to the jury display. An exhibit item publishes its bookmarked page — and if the item names a saved snapshot, that snapshot's annotations are rendered into the published page. A clip-list item starts designation playback of that list. Either way, any playback already running is stopped first. The button is disabled when the folder is empty or the jury display is closed.

While a binder is presenting, a script bar appears in the status stack with the binder name, the current item label ("Exhibit (page N)" or "Deposition Clips"), the position as "N of M", ‹ ⌘← and › ⌘→ to move, and Stop. Script Presentation also shows in the Workspace Modes badge in the title bar with its own Stop.

Warning: Present publishes each exhibit page to the jury display directly — there is no staging step and no separate Publish press. Review the folder's contents and each exhibit's admission status before you start.

### The Target Notebook

One binder at a time can be the Target Notebook: the running log of what actually went in front of the jury. Set it from the folder's context menu and a red REC badge marks the folder while capture is on. Setting a new one clears the flag everywhere else.

Entries de-duplicate, so flipping back to a page already captured adds nothing and replaying a list does not pile up rows. Turn it on for a hearing and the record of the day builds itself.

Note: Only the explicit Publish action on PDF and canvas exhibits is captured. Page flips in Live mode and Office exhibits are not logged automatically — use ⇧B for those. With no Target Notebook set, both the automatic capture and ⇧B are silent no-ops. ⇧B is the default binding and is rebindable in Settings ▸ Hotkeys.

QR / Barcode Recall

Every exhibit and every clip in the case has a scannable recall code. Print an exhibit with that code stamped on it, plug a USB barcode scanner into your Mac, and any page of the paper copy pulls the exhibit back onto your screen. It is a paper-to-screen shortcut for the podium, built for the moment opposing counsel names an exhibit you are already holding in your hand. There is no on-screen control and nothing to configure — the codes are generated when you print or export, and the scanner is read by the app whenever Evidentiary is frontmost.

### Print an exhibit with its recall code

Two commands live under PDF Tools on an exhibit's context menu.

The stamp is a 40-point QR code — about 14 mm, comfortably scannable from paper — knocked out on white in the bottom-left corner of every page, opposite the Bates corner, with the exhibit label printed beside it. Page rotation is honored, so it lands bottom-left as printed no matter how the page is stored. Nothing existing is moved or covered, and exhibits with no redactions are copied as vectors, so quality is unchanged.

Note: If the exhibit carries redaction marks, the stamped copy is flattened first and the redactions are burned in. The paper handed to the judge, the witness, or opposing counsel can never show what the screen hides.

Both commands stamp in the background, so the print dialog or the save panel is the only interface they present, and a failure sounds the system alert tone rather than opening a dialog. Neither is available for Office documents.

### Codes on lists and reports

The exhibit-list toggle stays visible in the Text and Excel formats but those outputs ignore it — choose PDF if you want scannable codes. Deposition rows on the list carry no code. The exhibit list export itself is covered in Reports and Exports.

### Use a barcode scanner in court

Any USB barcode scanner in keyboard-wedge mode works. There is no driver, no pairing step, and no scanner setting inside Evidentiary.

• Keep Evidentiary frontmost. A scan is keystrokes, and keystrokes go wherever keyboard focus is.
• Click into the sidebar or the viewer first — not into a text field. The scan check runs after the text-field guard, so a payload scanned while a notes field, filter box, sheet, or alert has focus is typed into that field instead of recalling anything.
• Scan a code on a printed exhibit or exhibit list and that exhibit is staged in your viewer. It is not published. Publish it as usual once you have it.
• Scan a code on a printed clip report and that designation plays in the impeachment player — see Impeachment Player.

Note: Because a scan stages rather than publishes, a mis-scan is a private mistake. The jury display keeps holding the last publish until you press Publish.

### How it works, and why it is safe to leave on

A recall code carries one of two payloads: an exhibit identifier that stages that exhibit, or a designation identifier that plays that clip. A keyboard-wedge scanner types the payload as a rapid burst of keystrokes and finishes with Return. Evidentiary buffers those keystrokes for as long as they still form a plausible payload, then acts on the Return. Anything that is not a payload falls through untouched to the normal hotkey layer at the first impossible character.

Two behaviors matter with a jury in the box. Keystrokes are only held together while they arrive less than 0.30 seconds apart, so a longer pause resets the buffer and ordinary typing is never absorbed into a scan. And the scan check runs before every hotkey block, so a scan can never jog video, flip a page, or fire an annotation tool.

Note: Codes carry the case's own internal identifiers. A code printed from one case does not resolve in another, and an exhibit or clip that has since been deleted does not resolve either. An unrecognized scan beeps and nothing changes.

### Scanner setup

• Set the scanner to keyboard-wedge mode, often listed as "HID keyboard" or "keyboard emulation".
• Configure it to append a Return or Enter suffix. Without it, the payload never commits.
• Set it to a US keyboard layout so the : characters transmit correctly.
• Typical scanners emit 10 to 50 ms per character, well inside the 0.30 second window. A scanner configured with a deliberate inter-character delay may fall outside it.
• To test away from the courtroom, scan into any text editor. The payload should read VK:E: or VK:C: followed by a 36-character identifier, then a new line.

Siri and Voice Control

Evidentiary registers four shortcuts with Siri, Spotlight, and the Shortcuts app, so the surfaces most often wanted with both hands full can be reached by voice: the guide, the pre-trial check, a new designation, and a new playlist. Run the app once and the phrases work whenever your Mac can hear you. Use Siri to open this guide at the right chapter, to check the case is court-ready, or to dictate a clip straight off a designation list you are reading on paper. Every phrase must include the app name — that is how Siri routes the request.

All four also appear in the Shortcuts app under Apps ▸ Evidentiary, where they can be run by click or wrapped into a larger shortcut. User Guide and Pre-Trial Check bring Evidentiary to the front. The two case shortcuts answer "Open a case in Evidentiary first, then try again." when no case is open.

### Ask how to do anything

Say "Hey Siri, how do I sync a deposition transcript in Evidentiary" and the guide opens at Depositions and Transcripts. "Show me how to…" and "How to…" work the same way, and "Evidentiary help" or "Open the Evidentiary user guide" opens the guide at its chapter list.

Two topics share a chapter by design — "QC check my clips" and "create deposition clips" both land in The Clip Editor.

### Dictate a clip

"Hey Siri, make a clip from Smith in Evidentiary" starts a designation by voice. The deponent name is matched tolerantly in both directions, so "Smith" finds "John Smith, M.D." and the reverse. Siri then asks "What range? For example, page 12 line 5 through page 14 line 20." and you answer naturally.

Siri transcribes spoken numbers as digits, so the parser reads the digit runs: four numbers make a full range, two make a single-line clip. Three numbers are rejected as ambiguous, and a page or line of zero is rejected.

The designation lands in that deposition's first clip list — a list named "Voice Designations" is created if there is none — with IN and OUT times filled from the sync. If the transcript is not synced yet, the clip is still created and the times fill in later. A range that crosses a video-volume boundary is split into one clip per volume, exactly as every other creation path does. Editing what you dictated is covered in The Clip Editor.

Thirteen phrases are registered for this one action, because there is no single way courtroom people say it: "Create a clip", "Make a clip", "Make a clip from ⟨deposition⟩", "Add a designation", "Add a designation for ⟨deposition⟩", "Make a depo edit", "Make depo edits", "Edit a depo", and the same three in "deposition" and in "depot" — Siri hears the spoken word "depo" as "depot", which is pronounced identically, so both spellings are registered. Add "in Evidentiary" to any of them.

Note: Deponent names are donated to Siri at launch, when a case is opened or created, and a few seconds after any change is saved. A deposition imported mid-session becomes speakable in "Make a clip from ⟨name⟩" shortly after the import finishes.

### Playlists and readiness by voice

"Hey Siri, create a playlist in Evidentiary" or "Make a new playlist in Evidentiary" asks "What should the playlist be called?" and creates an empty exhibit playlist at the end of the list. A blank name answers "The playlist needs a name."

"Hey Siri, run the pre-trial check in Evidentiary" — or "Is Evidentiary ready for court" — brings the app forward and opens the Pre-Trial Check window. The same window is on the Help menu and in the command palette.

### One limitation, and the way around it

Siri cannot take free-form numbers inside the opening phrase itself, so a range always arrives as the follow-up answer — two exchanges, still fully hands-free. For a one-step version, wrap either action in the Shortcuts app with preset or prompted values and name the shortcut whatever you prefer to say.

### If Siri does not respond

Siri must be turned on in System Settings ▸ Apple Intelligence & Siri. Beyond that, confirm registration before testing by voice again.

• Open the Shortcuts app and look under Apps ▸ Evidentiary. All four tiles should be listed. Typing "Evidentiary" into Spotlight shows the same shortcuts below the app.
• Keep exactly one copy of Evidentiary on the Mac, in the Applications folder. Extra copies — an older build in Downloads, a copy on an external drive, an unexpanded archive — register the same app identity more than once, and macOS can bind the phrases to a copy that is no longer there. Remove the extras, empty the Trash, then launch the Applications copy once so it re-registers.
• Include the app name in the phrase. "Make a clip" alone does not route to Evidentiary; "Make a clip in Evidentiary" does.
• For "Make a clip from ⟨name⟩", the deposition must exist in the open case. If it was imported moments ago, wait a few seconds for the name to be donated, or reopen the case.

Reports and Exports

Everything the case knows can leave it as a file. Export reports for the court and opposing counsel, hand the clerk an admitted-exhibits report at the end of the day, write clip video and designation reports out of the clip editor, and pass sync or clip data to another system in a format it can read. This chapter is the index: what each output contains and where the button is.

### The admitted-exhibits report for the clerk

The Admission Board — the gavel button in the Exhibits toolbar — shows every exhibit as one editable row, and its Export Clerk Report… writes the reconciliation document. The save panel defaults to "Exhibit Admission Report.pdf", and the file extension picks the format.

This is the end-of-day report: what was admitted, conditionally admitted, rejected, excluded, or withdrawn, on what basis, with the sponsoring witness and the time each status last changed. Statuses themselves are set in the Exhibits tab and on the board — see Exhibits.

### The exhibits-shown record

File ▸ Export Exhibits Shown Record… writes a PDF of what actually went in front of the jury: the permanent first-shown date stamped on each exhibit, the count and the pages shown this session, and a chronological log of the session's presentations. First-shown timestamps are recorded permanently with the case, so this report is reliable months later. It answers a different question from the clerk report — not what came in, but what the jury saw and when.

### The exhibit list

Export List in the Exhibits toolbar opens the Exhibit List Export window, which builds a filing-ready inventory. Every choice in the window persists, so the next export starts where the last one left off.

Rows are ordered by exhibit number the same way the sidebar sorts, so the export matches what is on screen. Deposition rows come from the deposition record: the deponent's name, "(N volumes)" when there is more than one, and the date taken. A write failure leaves the window open and posts the reason in red beneath the form.

Note: The export is a snapshot of the case at the moment you run it. Re-run it after a day of rulings rather than editing the exported file.

### A flattened copy of an exhibit

The presenter toolbar's export button writes a flattened PDF of the open exhibit in two variants: Published Marks Only… — the version of the page the jury actually saw — or All Marks (Including Drafts)…. This is the correct hand-off format for the court and for opposing counsel, because annotations that live as separate overlay objects inside the case become ordinary page content in the export.

Warning: Blur redactions are burned into the exported file as real pixelation. The obscured content is gone from the output and cannot be recovered from it. That is the intent of the format — verify you exported the variant you meant before sending it. The copy in the case is unchanged either way.

### Clip video

The clip editor's Export button opens a popup with a Video section (present when the deposition has video) and a Reports & Data section (always present). The button is disabled while the list is empty or an export is already running.

A Preset picker bundles the settings in one move: Courtroom 720p (720p H.264, no burned text, for third-party playback systems), High Quality 1080p (burned subtitles with page:line), and Email / Mobile (480p medium, for iPad review). Every preset leaves HEVC and linked-document burn-in off.

Warning: Any manual change to resolution, quality, HEVC, linked documents, or page:line silently flips the preset back to Custom. The setting you nudged is kept — only the label changes — but the popup is no longer describing a known-good courtroom bundle. If you want a preset's exact configuration, pick the preset last.

Warning: Burned subtitles cannot be turned off downstream. There is no separate caption track; the text is part of the picture, so the court, opposing counsel, and any third-party system receive it permanently. For a clean video, use Courtroom 720p.

Warning: Leave HEVC off for anything that will play on hardware you do not control. It halves file size at the same quality, but older Windows PCs and third-party trial-presentation systems may not play it. A file that will not open in front of the jury is worse than a large file.

Clips are skipped by the exporter when they are excluded from playback, carry a sustained objection, or have no IN/OUT times — run the list check in the clip editor first to see what will not make it into the output. Video rotation applies to playback only; it does not carry into exported clips.

To fix one clip after a batch, right-click that clip row and choose Export Clip as Video…. The save panel is pre-named to match the batch pattern, so the replacement drops straight into the earlier export folder, and it uses the current settings in the Export popup.

While an export runs, a progress strip shows a bar, the status, a time estimate, and a cancel button. In separate-files mode, Evidentiary checks the destination folder and warns before overwriting anything; Cancel abandons the export entirely and nothing is written.

### Designation, clip, full, and revision reports

Four PDFs and one text file describe a clip list at different depths, all from the Reports & Data section of the same popup.

The two PDFs include only clips marked for playback; excluded clips do not appear.

Note: When the transcript is machine-generated, both PDFs carry a disclaimer on the title page and an amber banner across every page after it: "MACHINE-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT — NOT CERTIFIED. VERIFY AGAINST THE VIDEO RECORD." Report pages get separated in binders, so the warning travels with each sheet.

The revision report has two doors. When a list carries revision marks, a Revision review banner appears above it with counts, and its Export Report… writes the PDF and reveals it in Finder. Export it before you accept the revision — accepting clears the marks and permanently deletes the struck-through clips. The Compare Revisions window has its own Export Report… that first asks whether to include unchanged rows, then writes a PDF with ORIGINAL and REVISED cards, tinted sections per status, and a summary line reading "N modified · N deleted · N added · N unchanged · runtime A → B".

### Exchange formats

.tws is the full-fidelity sync format between Evidentiary users. On import, sync entries are replaced wholesale, deponent metadata fills blanks only and never overwrites a name or date you set, and exhibit markers are kept only where the receiving case has that exhibit.

.dce grows an accessory checkbox in the save panel when the list contains partial-line clips: Flatten partial-line clips (for third-party presentation software), off by default. Left off, word-level trims round-trip intact between Evidentiary users; turned on, partial-line clips collapse to whole-line times so older systems can read the file. On import, a .dce is matched to a deposition by exact identifier, then deponent name plus volume, then deponent name alone.

Note: Sync XML always flattens partial-line clips to whole-line times — the schema has no place to record a word-level trim. Where word-level precision matters, use .dce with flattening off. A Sync XML export failure is logged rather than alerted, so confirm the file exists on disk afterward.

Warning: The .tws container is compressed and scrambled, not encrypted. Treat a .tws file as you would any unprotected work product.

### Hand a synced deposition to someone without Evidentiary

EvidentiaryVideo is a separate, free companion player for a deposition's synced video and transcript. A colleague, an expert, opposing counsel, or a witness can review synced testimony on a Mac or a Windows PC with no license, no case package, and no installation of Evidentiary itself.

The hand-off is two steps: export the deposition's sync as a .tws file, then send it together with the deposition's video files, keeping them in one folder. The player opens a .tws from File ▸ Open…, from a drag onto the window, or automatically when the .tws and its videos sit in the same folder as the player.

Note: A .tws carries timings and metadata, not video. Without the video files beside it, the player opens the transcript and shows a "Video file not found" overlay with a Locate Video… button.

Lines belonging to a volume with no video attached are marked visually, so it is clear why clicking them does not move the picture. Scrolling by hand reveals a Resume auto-scroll button that recenters on the playing line. ← and → step five seconds, and every key is ignored while a text field has focus, so typing a search query never moves the video.

### Everything else

Note: When presenting from Keynote in the courtroom, the jury window drops its window level while Evidentiary is inactive so Keynote can present over it.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Press ⌘/ anywhere for the live keyboard shortcuts sheet. It always shows your current bindings, including any you have changed, so it is the one reference that cannot go stale. Thirty-six workspace actions are rebindable in Settings → Hotkeys; the fixed navigation keys, the menu shortcuts, and the clip editor's own key map are not.

### The shortcuts worth memorizing

Warning: Space never publishes. The single-tap and double-tap detector always consumes Space, and Publish to Jury is bound to Return. Do not train yourself to reach for Space while the jury is watching.

### Rebindable hotkeys

These are the actions listed in Settings → Hotkeys, in the four categories the pane uses. Only the key is rebindable — where a ⇧ is shown, the Shift modifier belongs to that action and cannot be removed.

Annotation Tools — thirteen actions, live whenever an exhibit is on the canvas.

Jury Display — six actions. These are live in every context and never share a key with anything else.

Video Playback — six actions, live only while a video is loaded.

Canvas Controls — eleven actions, live while an exhibit is mounted.

Note: K and L each appear twice — once as a tool, once as a video shuttle key. That is deliberate. See Which layer wins, below.

### Rebind hotkeys

Rebinding happens in Settings → Hotkeys (⌘, then the Hotkeys tab). Each row shows the action, a one-line description, and a binding pill with the current key.

• Click the pill. It changes to "Press a key…".
• Press the key you want. The first bare press commits, and it applies immediately and survives relaunch.
• ⎋ cancels without changing anything.
• Presses holding ⌘, ⌥, or ⌃ are swallowed and never bind — that protects your menu shortcuts.
• Setting a key back to its factory value removes the override. A reset arrow appears on any row you have customized.

Shift can be part of a press, but the modifier itself is fixed per action: an action whose factory binding is ⇧E stays a shifted action no matter which letter you give it. Several actions share a base key and are split this way — ] and ⇧], = and ⇧=, R and ⇧R, B and ⇧B, E and ⇧E, N and ⇧N, P and ⇧P. Rebinding one member never moves the Shift.

Warning: If the key you record already belongs to an action that is not allowed to share it, that action is unbound rather than duplicated. Its pill reads "—" and a footer warning names it. An unbound action has no keyboard route at all — the on-screen buttons still work, but the muscle memory does not. After any rebinding session, scan the pane for a "—" pill before trial.

### Fixed keys

Not rebindable. These appear in the ⌘/ sheet under "Navigation — fixed".

In the Exhibits, Media, and Binders sidebars, ↑ and ↓ walk a cursor through rows and expanded pages, → expands a row or dives into page 1, and ← collapses. The arrow keys yield to the sidebar whenever your last click was in the list; otherwise they page the presenter.

### Menu shortcuts

Two behaviors worth stating. Close Jury Display also answers to ⌘⎋ from anywhere. And the Video menu carries no bare-key equivalents on purpose: the global monitor owns J, K, L, N, P, I, and Space, so the menu would be advertising keys it cannot honor. The menu shows only shortcuts it can legally display, which is why an action bound to Return, Tab, or an arrow key never appears next to a menu item.

Outside the menu bar, ⌘\ enters side-by-side from single view, and inside a split it loads the focused pane's next page into the *other* pane — press it repeatedly to walk one side forward while the other holds still.

### The clip editor

The clip editor is a floating editor window. It is exempt from the global key monitor and owns every key below. All of these are fixed.

While QC Review is running, ↩ marks the clip good and advances, R replays the current endpoint audition, ↓ skips the clip, and ⎋ ends the review. Every key handler bails out while the search field has focus, so typing a query never triggers playback.

Warning: ⌘Z is list-level — adds, deletes, splits, merges, sorts, moves, links, pastes, and wizard applies. It will not restore a mis-set IN or OUT time; re-stamp the point or run Auto-Fill Times to recover one.

### Impeachment player and Playback Mode

The impeachment player is also a floating editor window with its own keys: Space plays and pauses, K hard-pauses, L and J cycle forward and reverse jog through 1× → 2× → 4× → 8×, ← and → step a frame, ⇧← and ⇧→ step a second, and ⎋ closes the window.

Playback Mode is a plain window, so the global monitor keeps firing over it — Space, the arrows, J/K/L and the Escape ladder all behave as they do in the workspace. It adds two keys of its own: ⌘⇧V blanks the jury's video frame while audio and subtitles continue, and ⎋ closes, routing through the save-your-spot prompt.

### Which layer wins

Almost every "my shortcut did not fire" report is explained by the order the global monitor uses. A keystroke passes straight through, untouched, when the front window is the clip editor or the impeachment player, when a text view or text field has focus, when a sheet or modal is on screen, or when a barcode scan burst is in progress.

Once it gets past those, the layers are checked in order: page-jump digits first, then the Jury Display layer, then the no-modifier canvas commands, then the Video layer (only while a video is loaded), then the Annotation Tools and Canvas Controls layers (only while an exhibit is mounted), then the shifted actions.

The Video layer is allowed to shadow a tool key, and only in that direction. In practice that is two collisions: K is Pause Video while a video is loaded and Laser Pointer otherwise, and L is Shuttle Forward while a video is loaded and Line otherwise. With no video mounted, both fall through to their tools. Jury Display actions never share a key with anything, in any layer.

Escape ladder. ⎋ is taken by the first condition that applies: cancel a page-jump buffer, stop designation playback, stop video designation playback, clear the staging area, then fall through to the system. Windows that own their keys have their own ladder — Close in the impeachment player and in Playback Mode, end QC Review or clear the selection in the clip editor, Cancel in any sheet or popover. ⌘⎋ sits outside the ladder entirely and closes the jury display from anywhere.

Settings

Open Settings with ⌘,. It has five tabs — General, Captions, Defaults, Hotkeys, and Subscription — and stays reachable even when a subscription prompt is on screen. Settings are application-wide, not per case: a change here applies to every case you open on this Mac. The window is always dark and opens on General.

### General

Two toggles, both off out of the box.

• Auto-resume where you left off keeps your place — sidebar tab, open exhibit, and page — written into the case continuously, and restores it once per case open. A tab that is not currently available is dropped from the restore. Turning it off does not erase places already saved; it stops capture and restore, and turning it back on picks up from whatever was last recorded. When it is on, the welcome screen grows an Open case in safe mode checkbox that skips the restore for one open without deleting the saved place. Playback bookmarks are separate and prompt on their own (see Playback Mode).
• Move files into case instead of copying decides what import does with the original: leave it in place and copy into the case (the default, and the safest), or relocate it into the case package. Three exceptions apply. A file that cannot be moved — read-only media, a network volume — is copied instead. An image converted to PDF on import always leaves its original where it was. And the same checkbox sits at the top of the Pending Imports sheet, where it mirrors this setting in both directions: flipping it mid-import changes the global default.

### Captions

How synced testimony is drawn wherever it appears — operator playback, the jury display's caption band, the impeachment player's subtitle strip, the clip editor preview, and subtitles burned into exported clips. A live preview strip at the top of the pane shows a page:line stamp over sample testimony at your current settings.

Page:line size is a ratio, not a point size — the stamp renders at the caption font size multiplied by this value, so raising one raises both. Smooth scrolling glides lines up as testimony advances instead of jumping. The caption band under a video exhibit clamps background opacity to a 40% floor, so dragging the slider to zero still leaves a readable scrim there. Pad around clip is not a caption setting at all: it is the breathing room Tighten Clips leaves at each end after removing silence. Reset to defaults returns all six values at once.

This is the same control set as the Caption styling… button in the clip editor and the caption-style button in the designation playback bar — change it in either place and it changes everywhere, live, including on a jury display that is currently broadcasting. Set caption size during setup or between witnesses, not mid-block. What a caption *says*, and which words are colored, is set per line in Edit Subtitle Text… and always wins over anything here.

Caption styling does not reach the transcript viewer or the clip editor's transcript pane. Those have their own text-size stepper.

### Defaults

Starting values for two dialogs you would otherwise only meet in the middle of a task. Both directions are live: changing a value in the import sheet or the export popup writes it back here.

Exhibit Import — how the number is read off the filename (Space, Dash, Underscore, a custom prefix the number follows, or None to import as the filename), whether leading zeros are stripped, and whether Bates numbers are auto-detected, with the digit count and whether to read them from the document itself, running OCR if needed. Space, strip-zeros on, and Bates detection off are the factory values. These are only a starting point: every import still previews the derived numbers and refuses to proceed while a duplicate remains, so nothing set here can push a collision into the case.

Clip Export — the profile, resolution, quality, whether page:line is shown, whether linked exhibits are burned in, and HEVC.

Picking a profile fills in the rest. Touching resolution, quality, HEVC, linked-exhibit burn, or the page:line toggle afterward snaps the profile back to Custom, so the label never claims something the settings do not do. All three named profiles leave HEVC and linked-document burn off.

Warning: Leave Encode as HEVC (H.265) off for anything leaving your Mac. It halves file size at the same quality, but older Windows PCs and third-party trial-presentation systems may not play it — and silent audio on the other side is the usual symptom.

### Hotkeys

The pane lists all thirty-six rebindable actions under four category headers — Annotation Tools, Jury Display, Video Playback, Canvas Controls — each row carrying a binding pill you click to record a new key and a reset arrow that appears once you have customized it. The footer's Reset All to Defaults is destructive, disabled when nothing has been customized, and confirms before it runs. The full catalog, the recording rules, and what happens when a new key displaces an existing one are in Keyboard Shortcuts.

### Subscription

Your plan status, the purchase and Restore Purchases controls, Manage Subscription…, and the legal links live here. See the Subscription chapter.

### Controls that live elsewhere

A few settings stay with the feature they belong to rather than moving into this window, and each remembers its state between sessions: the Callout and Laser tool option popovers, the transcript text-size stepper, and the sidebar's list-density and sort choices. Each is covered in its own chapter above.

Subscription

Evidentiary is sold through the Mac App Store as a single auto-renewing subscription, Evidentiary Pro. There are no feature tiers — one subscription unlocks trial presentation, deposition sync, clip designation, and everything else in this guide.

### Pricing and plans

There are two plans, monthly and yearly, with the yearly discounted. Current pricing is delivered by the App Store in your local currency, so the authoritative answer to how much Evidentiary costs is always the price shown on the buttons themselves — on the launch paywall if no subscription is found, or in Settings → Subscription (⌘,) at any time. The cheapest plan is listed first. A plan you already own reads "Subscribed ✓" instead of a price. If no plans load at all, the section shows the underlying error or "Subscriptions unavailable. Check your network connection and try Refresh." — check the network and press Refresh.

### Billing, cancelling, and changing plans

Billing is handled entirely by Apple against your Apple Account, not inside Evidentiary. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled.

• To cancel your subscription — use Manage Subscription… in Settings → Subscription, which opens your App Store account's subscription page, and cancel there. Every feature keeps working until the paid period ends; nothing is locked mid-trial.
• To change plans — the same page. Switching between monthly and yearly is an App Store operation.
• To see receipts or request a refund — also the App Store, through your Apple Account's purchase history.
• Restore Purchases — use it after reinstalling, moving to a new Mac, or signing into a different Apple Account. It asks the App Store to re-deliver an entitlement you already own.
• Refresh — in the Status section. Re-runs the entitlement check without touching the purchase flow. This is the quickest confirmation after a renewal or a plan change made elsewhere.

Entitlement changes arrive live. A purchase, renewal, refund, or cancellation processed while the app is running lands without a relaunch, and Settings stays reachable from behind the paywall so a restore can be troubleshot before you get into a case.

Note: There is no redeem-code or offer-code field anywhere in Evidentiary. Promotional and volume codes are redeemed in the App Store itself; the entitlement then appears here after Refresh or Restore Purchases.

### Terms and privacy

Terms of Service opens the bundled terms in a window — the same text filed as the App Store license agreement — from Settings → Subscription, from the paywall, or from the Help menu. The Privacy Policy link opens the published policy in your browser. What the app does and does not process on your Mac is covered in Privacy, below.

Privacy

Is your data private? Yes, and the design behind that answer is short: every form of automated analysis in Evidentiary runs on the Mac in front of you. No transcript, no exhibit, no audio, and no video is uploaded anywhere for processing. There is no Evidentiary server to mirror anything to. Evidentiary sends no telemetry and has no analytics.

Where your case data lives. Everything belongs to the .trialcase package you chose: exhibits, transcripts, markup snapshots, admission records, notes, and presentation history. If you save that package in iCloud Drive or Dropbox, your cloud provider syncs it under your own account and terms — that is a choice you make by where you save the case, and the app warns once when it detects one of those locations.

Speech, sync, and diarization. Auto-Sync, Batch Sync, the rough AI transcript, and Auto QC all run through speech models bundled inside the application; speaker separation uses locally converted diarization models. Audio never leaves the machine, and syncing works with the network switched off.

Apple Intelligence features. Ask Evidentiary, Smart Depo Summary, and AI clip-label suggestions use Apple's on-device foundation model. Each degrades rather than reaching out: Ask Evidentiary falls back to chapter links, Smart Depo Summary reports that Apple Intelligence is unavailable, and the label-suggestion controls hide themselves. None of them contact a server.

Search and text extraction. Semantic search over transcripts and OCR'd exhibits uses the operating system's on-device language embeddings. OCR runs locally through the Vision framework. Objection detection is a local keyword scanner that strips nothing on its own — it only raises a badge for you to verify.

What does use the network. Four things, all of them explicit: the App Store handling subscriptions, purchases, and Restore Purchases; the Online User Guide menu item; the Privacy Policy link; and Manage Subscription… handing off to your App Store account. The bundled guide, Ask Evidentiary, the interactive tour, the changelog, the licenses window, and the terms window are all local and work offline. No network service listens on your Mac, and Evidentiary never requests local-network permission.

Diagnostics. Help → Export Diagnostics writes an hour of application log to your Desktop and reveals it in the Finder. It is written locally and transmitted only if you choose to send it, and it records application activity, not document content.

Voice control. Siri phrases are handled by App Intents. Speech recognition for Siri itself is governed by your macOS Siri settings; the intents Evidentiary registers operate on the open case locally.

Warning: The .tws sync exchange format is obfuscated, not encrypted for security. Treat anything you email as a .tws file as unprotected work product.

The bundled speech-recognition and speaker-diarization models are open-source components; their attributions and full license texts are under Help → Third-Party Licenses.

Troubleshooting

This chapter is arranged by symptom. Before any of it, the preventive step: Help → Pre-Trial Check… runs twelve checks over the open case and names the exhibit, deposition, or playlist behind every finding — exhibits with no number, no admission status, or a missing source file; conditional admissions still to connect up; depositions missing a deponent, a date, a transcript, or a video volume; designations with no time range; empty playlists; media this Mac cannot decode; and cloud files that have not downloaded. Run it the evening before, on the machine that will sit at counsel table; the decode check opens every media exhibit, so it takes as long as your video is large. It verifies the case, not the room — pair it with Test Pattern on Jury Display from its footer and one real publish to the courtroom monitor.

### Displays and the jury window

The jury window opened on the wrong display. Evidentiary keeps your primary display — the one with the menu bar — private and mirrors the jury feed to every other screen. Make your working display the primary one in macOS System Settings → Displays, and use Identify Displays (View menu) to flash a numbered card on every screen reading "This Mac", "Jury", or "Private". To keep one particular second monitor private without changing your primary, open Jury display options (the gear beside Open Jury) and click that display in the monitor map. This Mac's own display can never be assigned as a jury output.

Nothing is on the second monitor, but the app says the jury display is open. The monitor has been parked as Private. Run Identify Displays — if the courtroom projector shows a "Private" card, re-enable it in the display picker.

There is no second monitor at all. Opening the jury display warns that the jury view will take over your main screen. Open Anyway proceeds; ⌘⎋ closes it from anywhere.

A courtroom display flickered, changed resolution, or briefly lost signal. Evidentiary heals the jury view on its own — it resizes to a display's new resolution, and if a projector or cable drops out mid-presentation it re-opens and restores the published exhibit the instant the picture returns. Exhibits always keep their proportions, letterboxed on black, so nothing stretches on a 4:3 screen.

The picture on the projector looks stretched. Show the Test Pattern from the display picker or the Pre-Trial Check footer. The circle must be perfectly round; an oval means the display is stretching the picture. Fix the aspect setting on the projector, not in the app.

Nothing publishes. Confirm the mode. Publish is disabled unless the jury display is open *and* the mode is Staged. In Live the jury already mirrors your screen; in Blackout the feed is cut.

Keynote or PowerPoint will not present over the jury window. It does not need to be closed. The jury window drops to a normal level whenever Evidentiary is not the front application, and restores its shielding when you come back.

### Playback and codecs

A video will not play, stutters, or fails during clip export. Run the Pre-Trial Check with Video and audio decode preflight selected. It decodes a sample frame from every media exhibit and names the unsupported codec, the missing video track, or the decode error before the file fails in front of the jury.

A file that fails preflight. Right-click the exhibit and choose Optimize Video for Playback…, or open Edit Deposition and use the sparkles button on the volume row. Both re-encode to a clean H.264 MP4 and preserve clip times and transcript sync. Keep Back up the original(s) first on until you have confirmed playback. If optimization itself fails it reports why — unreadable file, no video track, not enough free disk space (roughly three times the original), encoder unavailable, or a duration drift that made the swap unsafe.

Audio plays on your Mac but is silent on a Windows PC. Re-export with Encode as HEVC (H.265) off, and leave it off for anything handed to the court or opposing counsel.

A file no re-encode can fix. If a video was copied from a network share or cloud folder and the transfer was truncated, the file's index runs past the end of its actual media data. No optimization pass repairs that. Re-copy from the original source.

### Cloud files and placeholders

Evidentiary warned that the case is in a cloud-synced folder. Move the .trialcase package to a local folder — Desktop, Documents outside sync, an external drive. iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive can swap files for download-on-demand placeholders, a stall you do not want mid-trial. A Don't warn again for this case checkbox suppresses the notice once you have decided.

A case or an exhibit opens to an error or an endless spinner. The file is a placeholder that has not downloaded. Evidentiary shows a download sheet with byte progress, or "Waiting for the file provider…" while the provider wakes up; Cancel or ⎋ aborts the open and leaves the previously open case untouched. If it fails, check that the Mac is online and the provider is running and signed in. You can also force it from the Finder: right-click the case → Download Now, let it finish, then reopen.

Warning: Do not rely on a cloud folder to download files on demand in a courtroom. Copy the case to the trial machine's local disk, or force a full download and pause syncing, then re-run the cloud check in the Pre-Trial Check to confirm nothing is still a placeholder.

### Sync and timings

Auto-Sync fails with an audio error. Three causes look alike. Re-run the sync once — a first-run failure is often the speech engine warming up. If it persists, run Optimize Video for Playback… on the volume, which fixes undecodable audio codecs. The third cause is a truncated file, which needs a fresh copy from the source.

Sync accuracy looks low. Front and back matter — appearances, certifications — never match audio and are excluded automatically. For interpreted testimony, enable Translator Present before syncing. Checking Run 2nd pass for added accuracy and syncing again buys back the stretches the first pass could not place, at the cost of a longer wait. Edit Sync on the transcript can rescue difficult stretches by hand.

Sync finished but the timings look wrong. Open Report in the Edit Deposition sheet. It is recomputed each time it opens and names the specific failure: a volume with no video attached, transcript running past the audio, audio starting after the transcript begins, a probable gap or sidebar, or timing running backwards at a given page:line. Copy Report puts a plain-text version on the clipboard for the videographer or court reporter. If it lists more than twenty gaps, the sync itself failed — re-running Auto-Sync beats triaging line by line.

Individual lines show an amber strip. That line's timing was interpolated from its neighbors rather than word-matched to audio. Play it before cutting a clip there. The clip editor shows the same condition as a low-confidence badge.

Partial-line clips drift. The deposition was synced before word-level timings existed. Use Add Word Timings in the Edit Deposition sheet.

A clip plays the wrong footage. Check the deposition's video volumes are in the right order in Edit Deposition — clip timings are anchored to volume order. If this appeared right after a realignment, verify a clip at a volume boundary: realignment shifts displayed page:line numbers while sync entries keep their raw numbers, which in a multi-volume deposition can route a lookup to the wrong volume. Reset Realignment undoes a bad offset.

A designation is missing from Playback Mode's queue. Only clips that are included, carry in and out times, and are not marked sustained are queued. Check the clip's Include switch; Sync Times or Auto-Fill Times will fill in missing times; and check its objection status if you did not mean to sustain it.

Playback Mode opened partway down the list. It resumed a saved spot. Press Stop to jump back to clip 1 — that also clears the bookmark for next time.

### Transcripts and exhibits

A scanned PDF imported as an exhibit instead of a transcript. The file is a scan or an unusual layout that page:line parsing could not read, so navigation, sync, and designations are unavailable for it. In order of reliability: ask the court reporter for an ASCII .txt transcript, which imports one-for-one; failing that, a text-based (not scanned) PDF. The Edit Deposition sheet's Convert PDF to TXT… button produces a standard ASCII file from a text-based PDF.

Opening a transcript shows an OCR progress panel. The PDF has no text layer, so Vision is recognizing it. It happens once; later opens are instant. Let it finish — it cannot be dismissed.

A red banner says the transcript is machine-generated. That transcript came from the AI rough-transcript feature and is not certified. Verify it against the video; syncing a real transcript replaces it. If Q and A speakers are reversed, use Swap Q and A Speakers on the transcript row context menu.

The transcript's page numbers are one off. Right-click the line that is wrong → Realign Page/Line… and type what it should be; the whole transcript shifts with it. Reset Realignment puts it back.

An exhibit will not OCR, or search cannot find its text. Run OCR on it first (right-click → Run OCR). Semantic search and the redaction assistant only read OCR'd documents.

An exhibit shows a quarantine badge. The file was quarantined, by you or by import safety checks. Right-click it → Mark as Safe to move it back, or review the file first in the case package's Quarantine folder in the Finder.

Side-by-side will not turn pages, and picking an exhibit exits compare. The split page lock is on — look for the Pages locked pill on the stage and click the lock button to release it.

The barcode scanner types into a search box instead of recalling. Click out of the text field first. Scans are ignored while you are typing in a field so they cannot corrupt your text.

Keynote export fails. Keynote must be installed, and macOS asks once for permission to control it. Approve it, or re-enable it in System Settings → Privacy and Security → Automation.

### Hotkeys, Siri, and stale builds

A hotkey does not fire. Work through these in order. Is a text field focused — a search box, a page-jump field, an input inside a sheet? The global monitor passes every keystroke through untouched in that case; click the canvas or press ⎋ first. Is a sheet or modal open? Is the front window the clip editor or the impeachment player, which own their keys entirely? Is a video loaded, so K pauses instead of arming the laser and L shuttles instead of arming the line tool? Is an exhibit mounted at all, since tool and canvas keys need one? Did a rebind unbind something — check Settings → Hotkeys for a pill showing "—". And are you holding ⌘, ⌥, or ⌃, which are never treated as tool or jury hotkeys? Your live bindings are always visible at ⌘/.

Siri phrases do nothing, or Siri cannot find the app. This is almost always Launch Services, not Siri: macOS has registered more than one copy of Evidentiary — usually an older build in Downloads, on the Desktop, or inside a mounted disk image — and the duplicate registrations cancel each other out. Keep exactly one copy, in /Applications, delete or archive the rest, then log out and back in so Launch Services re-scans. To confirm, open the Shortcuts app and search for Evidentiary: four tiles should appear — User Guide, Pre-Trial Check, Create Clip, and Create Playlist. If they are there, the problem is the spoken phrase, not the installation (see Siri and Voice Control).

A fix that "did not work." Confirm you are running the build you think you are. An older copy left open from a previous session, or launched from a second location on disk, behaves exactly as it always did. Quit every running copy, check the version in About Evidentiary, and confirm Help → New Additions and Fixes lists the change you are looking for.

A case opens to a broken or stale position. Reopen it with Open case in safe mode checked on the welcome screen. The case opens cold, auto-resume stays on and re-captures from there. Uncheck the box once things look right.

### Still stuck

Open Ask Evidentiary (Help menu) — type the question and it answers from this guide with a link to the chapter. For a bug, Help → Export Diagnostics writes the last hour of application log to a timestamped file on your Desktop and reveals it in the Finder. Do it promptly: the window is one hour and useful entries age out. Send it with the exact alert text and what you were doing at the time. The file records application activity, not transcript or exhibit content.