You can have any combination of workspaces including the Player, Schematic, and Animation Editor views, the three views affected by the Player controls. You can use the Player controls to play the composition in only the view currently in focus, or all the views simultaneously.

Master time is an abstract time you can use to synchronize playback among two or more Player, Schematic, and Animation Editor views. You synchronize playback between two views by setting both to follow master time. You can also set an offset for each view, so you can see different parts of the composition playing at the same time. For example, if you are creating a mask, you might have two Players, one in which to create the mask, and one to preview what's ahead, so you can take changes into account as you create the mask.

Master time always starts at frame 0, and has a duration equal to the length of the composition. If a composition starts at frame 215 and ends at 564, master time starts at frame 0 and ends at frame 349.

Standalone time is the opposite of master time. In standalone time, the view responds to the Player controls only if it currently has the focus; if another view has focus at that time, the view set to standalone time remains static. You can also set an offset for standalone time; in this case the offset is relative to the composition time.

You set a view to use master or standalone time using the Follow Master preference in the Playback tab of the view options. By default the view is set to use master time—see Synchronizing or Separating Playback between Views.