Dashboard

The dashboard at /dashboard is the home base. It surfaces your videos, your credit balance, your next step, and any guidance the pipeline thinks you'd benefit from. This page walks through every surface, top to bottom.

Top rail

The bar across the top has four things: a "New video" button, your credit balance, a "Buy credits" affordance if the balance is getting low, and your avatar.

The balance is live, it updates when a job spends credits without you having to refresh. Hover the number, you'll see a tooltip with the breakdown of what counts toward it (subscription allocation + any pay-as-you-go top-ups + rollover from previous months).

If you're a founding member, the badge sits next to the balance. It's permanent, even if you cancel and re-subscribe later.

Banners

A few banners surface conditionally above the main content:

Low balance. Fires when your remaining credits drop below 10 percent of your plan's monthly allowance. Includes a one-click "Buy more" CTA, with a pack recommendation based on your recent burn rate.

Auto pay-as-you-go nudge. Fires when month-to-date pay-as-you-go spend crosses 80 percent of your monthly PAYG cap (default cap £200, configurable in Settings → Billing). Lets you raise the cap, lower it, or disable auto-PAYG entirely before you hit the limit.

Checkout success. Fires for a few seconds after a credit purchase completes. Cleared by reload.

If none of these conditions are true, the banner row is invisible and the marquee starts immediately under the top rail.

Setup checklist

The first surface a new account sees is a four-step activation checklist:

1. Generate your first video.
2. Edit a scene in the editor.
3. Connect your YouTube channel.
4. Publish your first video.

Each step is gentle (it disappears when complete), but the order matches what makes a creator stick. Skipping straight to "publish" without having edited a scene is fine, the checklist isn't gating; it's nudging.

The checklist hides itself once all four steps are complete.

Editorial guidance banner

A four-pattern advisor that surfaces a single nudge at a time, severity-ranked. It looks at your last ten published videos and detects:

• Cadence too fast. Five or more publishes in seven days, the algorithm penalises bursts more than steady output.
• Hook similarity. Three or more recent hooks share the same opening six words; viewers may parse them as the same video.
• Voice monotony. Same voice across three or more videos, varying it helps with retention curves.
• Length monotony. Same target length across three or more videos, same logic.

Each pattern has a "Read more" / "Try this" CTA. Dismissing a pattern hides it for seven days. The whole banner hides if none of the four are firing.

The guidance is editorial, not gating, you can ignore it.

Marquee

The hero band under the banners. Your most recently published video, big and proud. Title, thumbnail, view count if YouTube is connected, a "Submit to gallery" affordance if the video qualifies.

If you've never published, the marquee is hidden and the surface starts at the projects list.

Filter chips + density toggle

Above the projects list:

Filter chips: All / In progress / Published / Failed. The counts update live. "Paused for review" status rolls under "In progress" so a job waiting on your input shows up there, look for the orange status pill on the row itself.

Density toggle: Cards or Rows. Cards is the default and easier to scan visually; Rows packs more videos per screen if you have a lot of them. The choice persists per browser.

Projects list

Each row (or card) is one project, one project usually contains one finished video, occasionally multiple regeneration attempts if you used the editor to re-run a stage.

Status pills:

• In progress. Outline, script, voice, footage, render, or publish stage running. Live-pulsing dot. Click through, the job-status page shows real-time stage updates.
• Paused for review. The pipeline hit a quality gate (low footage availability, VO anomaly, content policy concern) and is waiting on you. See Auto vs Manual mode.
• Ready to publish. The render landed, the publish surface is waiting.
• Published. Live on YouTube, or downloaded as MP4.
• Failed. Something went wrong end-to-end. The job-status page surfaces the error and an action; usually the action is "Retry" and that does it.

Pagination at the foot. The default page size is twenty.

Pages that aren't the dashboard

Things you'll see in the side nav (top-left menu icon on mobile, left rail on desktop):

• Projects (this page).
• Templates (forthcoming).
• Gallery (the public showcase of opt-in published videos).
• Docs (you're here).
• Settings.

Drop into Settings for plan / billing / notifications / integrations / account. See Account and sign-in.

When the dashboard says something looks off

The editorial guidance banner is the friendliest nudge; the "Paused for review" pill on a job is the most actionable; the failed-job retry button is the fastest path back to a render. Most things resolve in one click. Drop a line to hello@cuethescene.com if a job stays stuck in the same state for more than fifteen minutes.

What's next

Auto vs Manual mode covers when to let the pipeline run end-to-end and when to step into the brief, the outline, the footage, or the publish surface.

Editor overview covers the post-generation editor in detail.

Cheers,
Carl