The engine runs in a browser tab.

This is what that needs to work.

What it needs

WebGPU: Every frame is painted on your graphics card. This is the one requirement with no way around it, and it is also what a 4K timeline is playing on.
WebCodecs: Video is decoded by the browser’s own hardware decoder rather than by us, which is why the timeline plays rather than buffers.
Local file storage: Your footage is written to disk on your machine as it uploads, and the timeline plays those bytes. That is why scrubbing does not wait on the network.
A secure connection: Browsers switch all three of the above off on an insecure origin. In practice this only matters if you are running the studio yourself.

There is no partial mode and no software fallback. The studio checks for all four before it loads a project and tells you which one is missing, rather than opening a timeline it cannot paint, so opening it is the check, and it costs nothing to run before you upload anything.

What plays

In the tab: H.264 in an MP4, which is what almost every camera, phone and screen recorder writes. Both layouts are read, including the fragmented files that recorders and streams produce.
Everything else: HEVC, VP9, ProRes and the rest are transcoded when you upload them, into an H.264 copy the tab can play. Your original is kept as uploaded; the copy is a working file.
The proxy ladder: Three sizes are made for every clip: 360p, 720p and 1080p, plus a small separate audio track. Sizes larger than your source are skipped rather than upscaled.
On a second machine: The proxies are what streams when somebody else opens the project, or when you open it somewhere you have not uploaded from. That is the whole reason they exist.

Color and grading

Working space: Grades are computed in 16-bit floating point, in linear light, and dithered on the way down to what your screen shows. That is the step that keeps a graded sky from banding.
Scopes: Histogram, waveform, parade and vectorscope, at 256 levels, reading the same signal a scope on a desk reads. The same math runs on the graphics card and in a test that pins it, so the picture and the plot cannot drift apart.
Curves: Master, red, green and blue, up to four control points each. The interpolation cannot overshoot between your points, so a steep curve bends the picture instead of inverting a color in the shoulder.
Blend modes: Overlay, soft light, hard light, color dodge, color burn, difference and exclusion, to the standard definitions, each with its own layer opacity.
Source color: Rec.709, Rec.601 and Rec.2020 are read off the file rather than assumed, so SD and wide-gamut footage do not arrive on the timeline with a shifted cast.

Not yet

No desktop app: There is no installer for Mac or Windows, and nothing to download. The tab is the product, which is the trade the rest of this page describes.
No mastering codec out: A render is H.264, whichever codec went in. So a ProRes source is editable here and does not come back out as ProRes, which is the thing to know before a delivery depends on it. A mastering codec on the way out is wanted and is not built.
No EDL, FCPXML or AAF: There is no interchange exporter, so a cut made here cannot be handed to Resolve or Premiere for finishing. We know which teams that rules us out for.
No offline editing: Frames play from your own disk, but the project, your team and your renders live on our side, so the tab needs a connection to be useful.

If your browser passes, it will open a timeline.

Start editing What shipped lately →