Editor scene vs. the Canvas studio

Manim Studio has two workspaces that look, at a glance, like they could have been one: the main scene editor, where you place circles and axes and function graphs and keyframe them on a timeline, and the Canvas studio, where you draw freeform paths with a pen tool, import SVGs, and animate individual points. They live in the same project file and share the same window. They are still deliberately kept apart, and it's worth understanding why — because the separation shows up in one place that can be genuinely surprising: what actually gets rendered.

Same file, two separate object sets

Every object you create belongs to one workspace or the other. Draw a path in the Canvas studio and it belongs to the Canvas studio; place a circle in the main editor and it belongs to the main editor. There's no separate file, no second project format, and no export/import step between the two — one project holds both sets side by side.

What follows is that each workspace only ever shows you its own objects. The canvas, the timeline, the layers panel, the inspector, the fullscreen preview, the frame export, the code view, and the final render all show one workspace's objects at a time. A Canvas studio path and a main-editor circle can sit in the same project without either workspace's panels ever listing the other's work. Animations follow their objects: a keyframe on an object that belongs to the other workspace is hidden along with it. Camera moves are the exception — the camera belongs to the scene rather than to either workspace, so camera animations are always in play.

Why not just one toolset

The Canvas studio exists because freeform, point-level drawing — sketching with a pen or pencil, importing an SVG and reshaping its anchors, animating individual path nodes — wants a genuinely different toolset and a different mental model than placing pre-built geometric primitives (circles, axes, function graphs, 3D solids) and keyframing their named properties. A pen tool needs anchor handles, curve fitting, node-level selection. A geometry lesson needs snapping, construction lines, angle marks. Making one editor serve both well tends to mean compromising both: the object-placing workflow fills up with path-editing controls it never needs, and the drawing tools get bent to fit objects described by named fields rather than by arbitrary lists of points.

Keeping the two workspaces apart sidesteps that compromise. Neither toolset has to accommodate the other's assumptions. Just as importantly, neither workspace's layer list gets cluttered by the other's output — a geometry lesson's layers panel doesn't fill with scribbles from an illustration you sketched last week, and a vector illustration doesn't have a stray circle and a set of axes sitting in its stack because you used the same project file for a maths explainer.

What this means for rendering

Here's the practical consequence, and the one most likely to catch you out the first time: rendering and previewing always act on whichever workspace tab is active right now, not on the whole project. The same project file can therefore produce two genuinely different videos depending on which tab you were in when you pressed render. Switch from the main editor to the Canvas studio, render again, and you get a completely different scene built from a completely different part of the same file.