Track Name
To the left of each track are some buttons and properties that are important. The first is the track name. You should always name your tracks to help keep up with them. After a while, you’ll have a lot of them and it gets confusing fast.
Play Track Button
Below the Track Name is the Play track button 
. When this button is on (highlighted), it tells Cinelerra that this track is to be processed for output. As you work on a project, you may end up with several tracks that have been used in intermediate steps, but don’t need to go to the final output. You can click this button to toggle it’s Play status. If you Shift-Click the button (or any of the other track buttons for that matter) it will turn the button for this track on, but disable the button for all of the other tracks. If you Shift-Click again, it will turn the button on for all tracks.
Arm Track Button
The Arm track button 
is next and it is used to set the track “active” for making changes. Multiple tracks can be edited at one time, so all tracks which are “armed” will be affected by actions such as copy, cut, paste, delete, and rearranging track order.
Draw Media Button
The Draw media button 
determines whether a preview of the track is shown on the timeline. It is shown by default. Sometimes the previews get in the way of some track editing operations and can be disabled. If you don’t need to see the preview anyways, it will save some processing power as well.
Don’t Output Button
If you turn off the Play track button, the track will not be processed at all. But sometimes you want the track to be processed, but you don’t want any of the output to output to the screen. This may be because you have a visual effect on another track, but the effect is dependent on a track that you don’t want to display. The effect on the other track will still be able to read the track, but the track will not actually be shown. For this, use the Don’t output button 
. Since it sounds useless, you will now promptly forget about this button. In a week or two, you’ll desperately need it but since you forgot about it, you’ll try weird workarounds to get your project to work properly.
Transparency/Fader Slider
The video tracks have a transparency slider so that one track can be placed over another track but semi-transparently. The audio tracks have a slider too, but it is used for fade to adjust audio levels.
Overlay Mode
The overlay mode determines how a track is shown on top of another track. You access the feature by clicking on the triangle-shaped button (looks kinda like an arrow). Most image editing programs that deal with multiple layers have similar features. The normal mode is that the track simply covers up the track below it. The other modes produce interesting results, but can have functions for certain applications.
Nudge Track
The last box with the zeros in it is for nudging the track. This makes slight adjustments to the timing of the track, basically nudging it left or right on the timeline.
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