The workspace

Panes you arrange rather than a screen you accept, projects that live in your own browser, and the handful of settings that decide what shape the picture is.

Panes

The editor is a docking workspace. Five panes ship — Preview, Media, Inspector, Timeline and Curves — and none of them is fixed anywhere. Drag a pane's tab and every legal landing place lights up: beside another pane, above or below it, or onto its tab strip to sit as a second tab in the same group. Drag the seam between two panes to change how the space is divided.

The default arrangement. The Panes menu in the header reopens anything you have closed, and the control at the right of each pane header pushes that pane into a window of its own.

A pane on a second screen

Any pane can be detached into a real operating-system window and dragged onto another monitor. It keeps running — same project, same playback, same undo history — because it is the same application drawing into a second document. The timeline wants width and the preview wants the good display, and on one laptop panel those two are always fighting.

Layouts you can reuse

A project remembers the arrangement you left it in. That is the current layout, and it belongs to the cut. Separately, the Layouts section of the Panes menu saves a named arrangement — "the way I lay out for colour" — that can be dropped onto any project.

Applying a layout copies it in and the two stop being connected. Dragging a pane afterwards edits the project, not the saved layout; writing your changes back is the separate update action on the row. A stray drag must not rewrite an arrangement you set up on purpose.

Under a finger

On a touch screen the docking workspace is replaced rather than shrunk. Splitters are a four-pixel target and tab drags have no touch spelling, so a tablet gets a single column instead: the frame always on top, one pane below it, and a bar to say which. The preview never becomes a tab, because editing is watching the result of the last thing you did.

Which shell you get is decided by the pointer first and the window width second. A laptop with a touchscreen keeps the dock; a convertible folded into tablet mode flips.

Projects

The editor opens on an explorer of everything you have made. A project is a document: its tracks, its clips, its effects, its settings and the media it imported. Making a new one asks three questions and every one of them stays changeable.

Each card draws the project's own canvas at its own aspect ratio with the clips where they actually sit, so the shape of the strip is what tells two projects apart at a glance.

Rename, duplicate, delete: From the explorer, which is the only place that manages projects. The menu beside the project name in the editor header is the short way between two you are working on, not a second file manager.
Autosave: Every edit is written back, debounced. There is no save button.
What is not saved: The playhead, the zoom, the active tool, the selection and the undo history. Reopening gives you your edit back, not the exact frame you were parked on.

Media

Drag files onto the page, or use the button in the Media pane. Video, audio, images and SVG all come in the same way. An SVG is converted to editable shapes on import rather than kept as a file — see The canvas.

The Media pane holds this project's imports. Picture gets a filmstrip, sound gets a waveform, and both are drawn from the file itself rather than from an icon.

Dragging a video with sound onto the timeline creates two clips, linked: picture on a video track and sound on the audio track under it. They move, trim, split and delete together until you unlink them.

Where the bytes are

Imported files are copied into browser storage on this machine, in an IndexedDB store beside the project documents. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no server holding a copy and no upload to wait for — and the cost of that is a second copy of your media in the browser's storage.

Project settings

Two groups, and the split is about undo. The canvas — aspect ratio, resolution and frame rate — changes what the preview draws, so it is a project edit and ⌘/Ctrl + Z takes it back. The export defaults change no pixel until a render runs, so they stay out of the undo history: rewinding a trim should not quietly move the bitrate with it.

Twelve aspect ratios, drawn to scale, from Reels to Cinemascope — and a custom size if none of them is the one. Changing the ratio re-fits every clip rather than stretching or cropping what is there.

Aspect ratio: Stored as two integers rather than a pixel size, so the same shape is available at every resolution. 16:9 is 16:9 at 720p and at 8K.
Resolution: 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4K or 8K. The tier sets the short edge and the long one is derived, which is how every platform names a resolution: 1080p vertical is 1080×1920.
Frame rate: What a frame means everywhere else — the timecode readout, the one-frame nudge on the arrow keys, the grid keyframes land on.
Export defaults: What the export dialog opens with: container, video quality or a custom bitrate, and audio rate. All still changeable per export.

Every setting chosen when a project is created stays changeable afterwards, because none of them is a decision anyone can be expected to get right before they have seen a frame.

Getting around

Right-click almost anything — a clip, a track header, the ruler, an item in the media rack — for the operations that apply to it.
? raises the shortcut sheet in whichever window you are working in.
Every operation is reachable from the keyboard, with visible focus rings on all of it. The full list is on Keyboard shortcuts.