Introducing Video Studio for Web

Video editing on the web has a reputation problem. Most "online video editors" are thin front-ends for a server farm: you upload your footage, wait, click around a preview that's really a low-res proxy, wait again, and eventually a render queue somewhere emails you an MP4 — usually with a watermark and a subscription pitch.

We built Video Studio the other way around. Everything — decoding, preview, compositing, and the final MP4 encode — runs in your browser. Your footage streams straight from your 5AM library to your machine; frames never round-trip through our servers. The result feels less like a web form and more like a desktop editor that happens to live in a tab.

It's live right now at video-editor.

What you can do with it

The timeline works the way you'd expect if you've touched any modern editor:

• Blade & split. Press S (or ⌘K, or use the toolbar scissors) to split the selected clips at the playhead — or every clip under it when nothing is selected. Both halves keep playing the right part of the source, because split advances the new clip's in-point rather than duplicating media.
• Transitions. Crossfade, fade-to-black, and wipe between adjacent clips, with a duration slider and a marker on the clip edge. Transitions are a property of the cut: move a neighbor away and the transition goes dormant instead of corrupting anything; put the clips back together and it wakes up.
• Per-clip effects. Brightness, contrast, and saturation sliders plus preset looks (noir, sepia, warm, cool, vivid, faded) on any video or image clip — applied live in the preview and identically in the export.
• Per-clip volume. 0–200% loudness on any audio or video clip. Crossfades use equal-power curves, so blends don't dip in loudness halfway through.
• Layers. Stack tracks with videos, images (full-frame or positioned overlays with scale and opacity), text, solids, and audio with live waveforms.
• Ripple editing. Ripple-delete closes the gap a removed clip leaves behind; Alt-drag a trim handle and everything downstream follows.
• Undo/redo. ⌘Z through your whole session — one undo step per gesture, not one per pixel of slider movement.

And when you're done: Export Video produces a real MP4 — H.264 with AAC audio, bitrate scaled to your resolution and frame rate — encoded by your own machine's media hardware.

The part we're proud of: one compositor, two threads

Here's the trap every preview-plus-export editor falls into: the preview is one renderer, the export is another, and the two slowly drift apart until "what you see" and "what you get" are merely related. We know because we fell into it — early versions of this editor had two separate drawing pipelines, and pixel-level differences kept sneaking in.

The fix was architectural. Every frame you see — in the live preview and in the exported file — is now drawn by one shared compositor module. The preview worker and the export worker each supply it a tiny adapter ("give me a drawable for this clip at this time") and the compositor owns everything else: layer order, transition blending, effect filters, letterboxing, text, waveforms. A grading tweak or a new transition lands in one file and is automatically identical on both paths. A whole class of "looks-different-after-export" bugs became structurally impossible.

The same discipline applies to audio: the gain math for crossfades and volume lives in one shared module, consumed by the preview's sample pipeline and the export's mixer alike — so what you hear while scrubbing is what ends up in the file.

What this means for you: the preview is the product. Grade a clip, tune a crossfade, nudge a title — the MP4 you download looks and sounds exactly like the frame you were staring at. No export surprises, no "why does it look different now," no re-render roulette.

Built on the modern web media stack

None of this would have been practical even a couple of years ago:

• WebCodecs gives us hardware-accelerated decode and encode from JavaScript.
• Web Workers + OffscreenCanvas keep decoding and compositing off the main thread — the timeline stays responsive while a preview plays or an export encodes. You can keep scrubbing and editing during an export, and cancel it instantly.
• The Web Audio API premixes the soundtrack — clip volumes, trims, and transition envelopes are baked sample-accurately before encoding, and audio buffers are placed by their source timestamps so trimmed and split clips stay perfectly in sync.

Long timelines get special treatment: past three minutes, the audio premix switches to a chunked pipeline that processes a minute at a time, so an hour-long cut doesn't need an hour of audio held in memory at once.

Your edit is versioned, merged, and never lost

The editor auto-saves. Two seconds after you stop tweaking, your project is silently persisted — with a couple of touches we sweated over:

• One version per gesture. Dragging a slider for five seconds produces exactly one new version, committed when you let go — not thirty micro-versions.
• A real version history. Saves are stored as compact diffs with periodic full snapshots, so you can browse and restore any point in the project's history without the storage cost of full copies.
• Conflict-safe collaboration. Share a project with edit access, and two people can work on it. Saves merge on the server with a deterministic three-way merge — tracks and clips merge by identity, so someone moving a clip to another track while you trim it resolves as both changes, not a duplicate. When the merge finds a genuine collision, the editor shows you exactly what happened instead of silently picking a side. And a background auto-save will never replace the timeline under your hands — if the server has newer work, you review it; it doesn't just appear.

Honest limitations

In the spirit of our other launches: this is a v2, not a Final Cut replacement.

• Effects render through canvas filters; very old browsers without ctx.filter support show unfiltered previews (we tell you when that's the case). A WebGL path and LUT support are on the roadmap.
• Three transition types today. The architecture makes new ones a single-module change, so expect the list to grow.
• Keyframed volume envelopes and cross-track ripple aren't there yet.

Try it

Open video-editor, drop in some clips from your library, press S a few times, add a crossfade, drag the brightness slider, and export. The whole loop — edit to MP4 in hand — takes about a minute, and none of your footage ever leaves your machine on the way.

It's part of the same hub as everything else — the library your clips come from, the CLI that can push renders in overnight, and the AI Studio that generates new material to cut. One place, browser or terminal.

We think that's how video editing on the web should feel. If you take it for a spin and something's rough — or there's a transition or effect you're missing — tell us. Early adopters shape the roadmap more than anyone else.

Open Video Studio →