BackendStudio

1. Getting started

When BackendStudio opens, the Welcome screen lets you start a New project, Open an existing one, or pick from Recent. If the app closed unexpectedly last time, it also offers to Recover your unsaved work.

A 60-second tour

1. Record — press Record, pick your display and audio, and capture your screen. The recording appears in the media bin.
2. Import — or drag existing video, audio and images into the media bin.
3. Build — drag clips from the bin onto the timeline, then trim, split and arrange them.
4. Preview — hit Composite to watch the whole timeline back.
5. Export — render everything to a single MP4, and Save your project so you can come back to it.

2. The workspace

The editor is a dense, professional layout modelled on pro video tools:

• Toolbar (top) — record, import, undo/redo, and export.
• Media bin (left) — every recording and imported file, shown as a thumbnail with resolution and duration.
• Preview (centre) — the player, with transport controls and a Composite button to play the whole timeline.
• Timeline (bottom) — the ruler, playhead, and stacked video and audio tracks.
• Inspector (right) — properties for the selected clip (position, scale, opacity, speed, volume, fades).
• Status bar (bottom) — reports the result of each action; a banner appears after long jobs like export and recording.

3. Recording your screen

1. Press Record. In the options, choose the display to capture, the frame rate, whether to include system audio and your microphone, and an optional camera — a live camera preview shows what the webcam overlay will capture.
2. Recording begins and a live timer shows the elapsed time.
3. Press Stop to finish. BackendStudio encodes the capture, mixes the audio, and saves an MP4 to your Videos\BackendStudio folder — and drops it into the media bin, ready to edit.

4. Importing media

Add your own footage in either of two ways:

• Drag and drop video, audio or image files onto the media bin.
• Import (Ctrl+I) opens a file picker — select one or several files at once.

Each item is analysed for its resolution, duration and frame rate, and shown with a thumbnail (a waveform for audio-only files). Recordings you make go through the same path and appear alongside imported media.

5. The timeline

The timeline has stacked tracks — video and audio — with a ruler and a draggable playhead.

Adding & moving clips

• Add a clip — drag an item from the media bin onto a track.
• Move — drag a clip’s body along the track, or vertically onto another track of the same kind.
• Trim — drag a clip’s left or right edge handle to shorten or lengthen it (within the source’s available footage).
• Snapping — clips snap to the start, the playhead and neighbouring clip edges; hold Shift to move freely.

Track controls & zoom

• Each track header has mute, solo and lock toggles. A locked track can’t be edited by accident.
• Zoom in and out to control how much time fits on screen (the ruler re-steps automatically).
• Right-click a track header to remove the track; click empty timeline space to deselect.

6. Editing clips

• Split (Ctrl+K) — cuts the selected clip in two at the playhead.
• Copy / Paste (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V) — paste lands at the playhead on the clip’s track.
• Merge (Ctrl+M) — rejoins two adjacent pieces of the same source back into one clip.
• Delete (Del) — removes the selected clip.

7. Adjusting a clip (Inspector)

Select a clip to open its properties in the Inspector on the right:

• Position & scale — move and resize a video clip within the frame, e.g. for a picture-in-picture inset over another track.
• Opacity — make an upper-track clip partly transparent for overlays.
• Rotation — rotate a clip within the frame.
• Colour — adjust brightness, contrast and saturation.
• Speed — change a clip’s playback speed.
• Volume and fade in / out — see Audio.

Titles & transitions. Use the Titles panel to add captions, and the Transitions panel (or the timeline’s Crossfade action) to add a crossfade / dissolve between clips; the Effects panel groups the visual adjustments.

8. Audio

• Per-clip volume — set each clip’s level in the Inspector.
• Fade in / out — add smooth fades at a clip’s start and end.
• Mute / solo — toggle whole tracks from their headers; solo lets you hear one track in isolation.

On export, all audible tracks are mixed down into a single track, respecting your volume, fade and mute/solo settings.

9. Previewing

• Single clip — selecting a clip loads its source in the preview, paused on its first frame.
• Composite — the Composite button plays back the whole timeline with all tracks combined. While it plays, the timeline playhead follows along; while paused, scrubbing the playhead seeks the preview.

10. Exporting

1. Press Export and choose the target resolution and frame rate, then a destination file.
2. BackendStudio renders every track into a single MP4 — video tracks composited in order, all audio mixed — using hardware-accelerated encoding for speed.
3. A progress bar tracks the render; when it finishes, a banner offers Show in folder.

11. Projects, autosave & recovery

• Save / Open (Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O) — a project stores your media pool, tracks and clips (it references your media by path, so keep the source files in place).
• New (Ctrl+N) — start a fresh project.
• Autosave — your work is saved periodically in the background, written safely so an interrupted save can’t corrupt the project.
• Crash recovery — if the app closes unexpectedly, the Welcome screen offers to recover your most recent unsaved state.

12. Keyboard shortcuts

13. Troubleshooting

• My microphone wasn’t recorded. Tick the mic option in the record popup before starting, and confirm the correct microphone is enabled in Windows sound settings.
• Export is slow. Exports are fastest on a PC with a graphics card that supports hardware video encoding; on machines without one, rendering falls back to the processor and takes longer.
• A clip shows as missing. Projects reference media by file path — if you moved or deleted a source file, re-import it or restore it to its original location.
• Two clips overlap on one track. That’s treated as intentional layering (the upper track composites on top). Move one clip aside if you didn’t mean to stack them.
• The app closed unexpectedly. Reopen it — the Welcome screen will offer to recover your unsaved work.