Pop-out windows

Float a panel into its own window, and send a clean full-screen output to a second display.

Floating a panel

Right-click a panel's tab and choose Float Panel. The panel leaves the dock and opens in its own window. Each floating window carries a title bar that fades in when the cursor is over it and out again when it leaves.

Six panels are wired to render when floated: Parameters, Pinned, Console, Layer Manager, Performance and Export. Each stays live, tracking the same project as the docked version. A floated Parameters panel follows the selection frame by frame.

Every other panel declines the gesture and stays docked. Viewport, Node Graph, Timeline & Layer Manager, Assets, Data Viewer, per-node viewers and plugin panels have no floating implementation, so a second monitor cannot hold the viewport or the main graph today.

The window opens at a size chosen for the panel kind, 350×700 for Parameters and 600×400 for most others. Resize and move them like any other window.

There is no way to put a floated panel back. Dragging it at the dock does nothing, and closing the window discards it. Bring the panel back from View > Panels, which re-opens it as a floating window rather than docking it.

Editing a subgraph in its own window

A subgraph is the one graph that does open in a window of its own. Right-click a subgraph node and choose Edit in Window, and a 1200×800 editor opens on that subgraph's contents. It is a full canvas, not a read-only view: Tab opens the node palette over that graph, placing a node from it is undoable there, Cmd+F searches that graph and dims the nodes that do not match, and the window keeps its own camera, selection and undo history. What you cook in the parent shows through, so the editor is live rather than detached.

Several things the main canvas offers are not built into that window. There is no right-click menu on a parameter row and none on an output socket, so Adjust range... and Pin to Data Viewer are unreachable there. Inline rename, the solo dimming, per-node cook timings and the inline viewport previews are all absent too, and right-clicking a palette entry does nothing because the palette's own customisation menu is only drawn over the main window. Nothing is saved separately: edits reach disk when the project is saved, exactly like the main graph.

The Performance Output window

Performance Output is a separate window, not a floated panel: the composited canvas on a black background, at 1920×1080. No node graphs or timelines appear in the frame, which is what makes it the surface to send to a projector. Until the first frame composites it reads "Waiting for compositor...".

Open it from View > Performance Output, or press Cmd+P. The same command closes it again. Drag it onto the second display and set that display to full screen. The main DNA window stays on the laptop screen for driving the performance. See Live performance for running a live set.

While the output window is focused:

The stats overlay's frame rate is a placeholder reading a fixed 60 fps, not a measurement. Use the The performance panel for real frame timing.

What is remembered

The dock layout is written when the app quits normally, and restored at the next launch: which panels are open, how they are split, the splitter positions, and the active tab in each stack.

Floating windows are part of it too. Each one reopens at the position and size it was left at, so a two-monitor arrangement survives a restart. A panel recorded as floating that cannot float in the current build is dropped rather than reopened into a window it could not draw. The main window's own size is not restored.

See also