The editor

The editor is a non-linear editor: it assembles the project's shots, together with imported video, audio and images, into a finished sequence, and renders that sequence to a file.

It is the other half of the application. The canvas makes a shot; the editor makes a film out of shots. The two are connected — a shot on the timeline is the live shot, not a copy of it, and reopening it in the canvas is one tap away.

Opening it#

The editor is not a tab. Open a project and tap Open Editor in the toolbar; the editor takes over the whole screen. Its own ✕ in the top corner closes it and returns to the project.

Making it full-screen is deliberate — an edit timeline wants the width, and a project tab strip above it was taking a bar's worth of height from every panel.

The Edit workspace#

The editor runs the same dock engine as the canvas. Panels tab, tear out, float, dock to a screen edge and iconise to a rail exactly as they do while drawing, and the arrangement is saved and restored the same way. The two are separate instances of one engine, so the editor keeps its own arrangement and its own saved workspaces — rearranging panels here never disturbs the canvas.

There is one built-in workspace, Edit, laid out the classic way:

The editor has no tool palette and no QuickStrip. Both are hidden in this workspace and take up no width, because there is nothing here to draw with.

The Sequence panel is the one panel that cannot float: like the canvas timeline it is a bar, and it is handed the whole bottom column.

The editor's toolbar#

Three things sit above the panels.

The program monitor#

The monitor is the picture in the middle. It shows the composited frame under the playhead and nothing else — it is not a panel, has no tab, and cannot be moved, closed or tabbed. It occupies whatever space the docks leave free.

The monitor carries no controls. There is no transport, no timecode, no zoom or fit picker and no guides on it; all of the transport lives in the Sequence panel's own toolbar. Before anything is under the playhead the monitor shows a film glyph.

It has one interaction. When the selected clip carries a mask, the mask's outline is drawn over the picture as a dashed cyan rectangle or ellipse, and dragging it moves the mask. The outline moves the mask's position only — its size is set in the Clip Inspector.

The Media panel#

Media holds everything the sequence can use, organised into bins. The bin rail is on the left of the panel; the assets in the selected bin fill the rest as a grid of tiles.

Two bins ship with every project:

Bins nest, and new ones can be created inside others.

The Shots bin syncs itself#

You do not put shots into the Shots bin — the bin mirrors the project. It re-syncs when the tab opens, whenever you return from the canvas, and when a sequence is nested.

The sync adds an asset for each new shot, removes the assets of deleted shots, keeps the names and the ordering matching the Shots tab, and re-probes a shot's duration, frame rate and resolution whenever the shot has been modified since it was last read. An animated shot gets a real duration; a shot with no animation has no duration and behaves like a still, stretching to whatever length you trim it to.

Because the bin is a mirror, shots cannot be deleted from it — the Delete and Move to Bin items are absent for shots. Delete the shot from the Shots tab and it leaves the bin on the next sync; clips still referencing it render offline.

Importing#

The + menu at the top of the panel holds three items:

Imports land in the selected bin. Selecting the Shots bin and importing is the one exception — the file goes to the first ordinary bin instead, because the Shots bin is a mirror and cannot hold anything else.

Working with assets#

Each tile shows a thumbnail where one can be made, a duration badge when the asset has a duration, and the asset's name. Shots and audio show their glyph rather than a thumbnail.

Drag a tile onto a track to place it. Dropping onto a video track takes the video and its audio together when the asset has both; dropping onto an audio track takes the audio alone. A locked track refuses the drop.

An asset's context menu holds:

A bin's context menu offers Rename and Delete Bin. The Shots bin has neither and cannot be renamed or deleted.

Open in Canvas — the round trip#

A shot on the sequence is not a rendered copy. It is the shot, drawn on demand at whatever frame the playhead is on, so an edit made in the canvas appears in the cut.

Closing the canvas returns you to the editor, drops the cached renderer for that shot, and re-syncs the Shots bin — so the next frame the monitor draws is rebuilt from the shot as it now stands, and any change to its duration or name is picked up.

Shot audio is not mixed into the editor. A shot clip contributes picture only.

Sequences#

The first sequence is created automatically the first time the editor opens, named Sequence 01 and running at 1920 × 1080 and 24 fps. It starts with two video tracks and two audio tracks. Sequences and bins are stored beside the project, and every edit is written out as you make it.

A project can hold as many sequences as you like. The editor's title is the current sequence's name, and it is also the menu that adds, switches, renames, duplicates, deletes and configures them — see Sequences & keyboard.

Exporting#

The Export button in the top bar renders the sequence to a file. It is disabled while the sequence is empty. The options, and the difference between this and exporting a single shot from the canvas, are covered under Sequence.

See also#