Changelog

Version 3.0

Added — playback

• Playback no longer renders anything to play it. The preview decodes and composites the timeline in real time, paced by the timeline’s own audio, with no encoding step and no temporary file involved at all. Play starts in about a quarter of a second regardless of how long the timeline is — measured at roughly 0.2s against 5s for the old render-then-play route on the same project.
• Playing a stretch you have already played is instant, and stays instant as you edit. The preview is cached in short slices keyed by what each one actually contains, so changing one clip only re-does the slices that clip touches — everything else is reused. A cached play is fully seekable, so scrubbing works normally.
• Where rendering is still needed, Play starts while it is still running instead of waiting for a progress bar to reach the end, and it starts at the playhead rather than from 0:00. Measured on a one-minute timeline of dense footage, 4.5s of waiting became 1.0s; starting at 0:50 of that timeline, 5.3s became 1.0s — and unlike before, neither figure grows much as the project gets longer.
• A timeline that is a single untouched clip plays with no rendering at all — the record-then-press-Play case. It falls back to a normal render the moment anything would make the result differ from the raw file: any effect, a fade, a second clip, or a resolution mismatch.
• Playback now tells you what it cannot play smoothly, before you press Play. A thin bar under the time ruler marks stretches that are already rendered (green) and stretches heavy enough to need rendering first (red). Ordinary footage shows no bar at all — it only appears when it has something to say.
• The preview is rendered ahead while you are not doing anything, so the heavy parts are usually ready before you reach them. It runs only while the app is idle and paused, covers a short stretch either side of the playhead, and stops the moment you edit.
• A stretch too heavy to play live hands back to the rendered preview mid-playback instead of freezing the picture while the sound carries on. It notices within about a second and switches over, so playback continues rather than stalling.
• Pressing Play at the end of the timeline now replays from the start. It previously did nothing at all.

Added — transitions

• Real two-clip transitions — 58 of them. Wipes, pushes, slides, circle crops, radial, pixelize, blur, zoom, cover and reveal. Unlike a crossfade, which fades the incoming clip over whatever is beneath it, these blend the two pictures together. Pick one under Blend with previous in the Transitions panel. Both clips need the same size and position, and the app says so rather than silently producing a hard cut.
• The Transitions panel is now a real panel. It used to be a sentence pointing at the Inspector plus one button. It now has a length control everything shares, one-click Crossfade with previous and Slide in over previous, Crossfade every cut across a whole track as a single undo step, Enter/Exit tiles for fades, slides and spin, and Fade in from black / out to black for the whole video.
• See every transition in the project at once, in timeline order, with what each clip carries and when — click a row to jump to it, or clear it from there.
• Crossfade length is no longer stuck at 1 second. The panel, the Inspector and a clip’s right-click menu all now use the length you pick.

Added — effects

• The Effects panel is now a real panel. It used to be a header and one sentence telling you to go and look at the Inspector. It now browses and applies: Looks presets (Warm, Cool, Punchy, Faded, High contrast, Black & white), a tile per effect, and an applied to this clip list showing what a clip is actually carrying, with its current values. The Inspector keeps its sliders — nothing moved out of it.
• Privacy blur and pixelate regions — draw boxes over an API key, an email address or an account number and they are hidden in the export. Drag and resize them right on the preview; each can blur or pixelate, and can cover only part of the clip’s length. Only the box is filtered, not the whole frame, so they are cheap to render.
• New effects — blur, sharpen, vignette, hue, colour temperature (a real warm/cool white-balance shift), and mirror / flip, the last being the usual fix for a webcam recording you the wrong way round.
• Per-clip crop — trim any edge as a percentage of the source. The drag handles in the preview follow the cropped edges rather than the original frame.
• Switch an effect off without losing it. Each row in the applied list has an On toggle that bypasses the effect while keeping its settings, so a look can be flipped on and off to compare.
• Copy / paste effects between clips, from the panel or a clip’s right-click menu. Speed is left out on purpose — pasting it would change how long the target clip is.

Changed

• Real-time playback is on by default. It was opt-in in the previous build. Every older playback route is still there beneath it and is used automatically whenever the real-time path can’t cope, so nothing is lost.

Fixed

• The app could close unexpectedly while previewing clips that butt up against each other. A still frame taken from a clip boundary can come back malformed; it decoded without complaint and then failed later, where nothing could catch it. Since any split produces back-to-back clips, this was reachable in normal editing. Such frames are now skipped.
• Splitting or pasting a clip silently dropped most of its settings — a split lost its rotation, keyframes, transitions, punch-in zoom, chroma key and text styling, because the clip-copy path listed only about half the fields on a clip. It now copies everything, and a self-test checks it.
• Jumping to a different point in the timeline is faster, and no longer gets slower as the project grows. The soundtrack was being rebuilt from scratch on every jump even though jumping cannot change it — measured on a five-minute project, about half a second per jump, gone. A jump in a five-minute project now costs no more than one in a forty-second project.

Version 2.2

Added

• The Titles panel now lists the text labels on the timeline, in timeline order with each one’s start time. Click a row to jump to it — that selects the label, parks the preview on it and scrolls the timeline to it. The rows are the live clips, so retyping a label updates its row as you type.
• Timeline zoom shortcuts. Ctrl + mouse wheel zooms about the pointer — the instant under the cursor stays under the cursor, so zooming in to line up an edit doesn’t throw it off screen — plus Ctrl + / Ctrl - and Ctrl 0 for 1:1. The wheel on its own still scrolls the tracks.

Fixed

• Colour and transform edits now show on the frame you are looking at. Moving Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Size, Rotation, Position, Opacity, Speed, the punch-in zoom or the chroma key changed nothing on screen until you pressed Play and waited for the whole timeline to re-encode, because selecting a clip put its raw source in the preview. Any of those edits now switches the preview to an effects-applied still frame at the very instant you were already looking at, and follows the slider as you drag it.
• Saturation above about 2.1 did nothing at all — in the preview and in exports. Past that point the whole render failed rather than producing a more saturated frame, so the top third of the slider was dead. The full range now works, and the colour self-test covers the top of it.
• Media bin thumbnails and timeline waveforms are back. Every bin item had been showing the generic film icon and audio clips had been drawing empty, since the thumbnail and waveform generators started writing to a crash-safe temporary file whose name they could no longer make sense of. Existing projects pick their thumbnails up when reopened.
• Typing in the Inspector no longer triggers timeline shortcuts. Bare M adds a marker and Space plays — so typing “Time” into a text label planted a marker on the “m”. Single-key commands now stand down while a text field has focus.
• The timeline now scrolls to the clip you just added or selected. It never scrolled at all, so a title dropped at a playhead you had scrolled away from went in correctly, was selected, and showed in the preview and the Inspector — while the timeline sat looking empty.
• The timeline’s horizontal scrollbar no longer hides itself. It sat at the bottom of the vertically scrolling content, so once you had enough tracks to scroll, you had to scroll down to reach the control that scrolls sideways. It is now always on screen.
• Text labels no longer appear in the media bin under a raw identifier — where “Remove from project” on one would take the source out from under a title clip still on the timeline, dropping it from every render without a word.

Version 2.1

Added

• Per-property keyframes. A keyframe now holds only the property you actually keyed, so Position, Rotation and Opacity animate on independent schedules — Position keyed at 0s and 2s while Opacity is keyed only at 1s is now two separate curves rather than one keyframe forced to own all three at once.
• A key button beside each animatable property, showing that property’s state at the playhead: hollow grey (not animated), hollow red (animated, between keys), solid red (parked on a key — clicking removes it).
• Inspector fields now read the value at the playhead. Scrubbing an animated clip updates its numbers instead of showing a stale static value, and once a property is animated, changing its value keys it at the playhead automatically.
• Keyframe markers on the timeline — red diamonds along the bottom of each clip at their real times, so an animated clip is identifiable without opening the Inspector.
• A transport bar under the preview — go to start, previous keyframe, play/pause, next keyframe, go to end. Each animated property also gets its own pair of step arrows in the Inspector, stepping through that property’s curve alone.

Changed

• Buttons now respond to being pressed across the toolbar, nav rail and panels, with a clearly deeper fill and a slight depress under the pointer — several controls had no pressed state at all before.
• Animating position or rotation no longer pays the export cost of animating opacity too, so position and rotation animation exports noticeably faster.

Fixed

• The on-preview transform handles and the paused-preview compositor now correctly track an animated overlay’s current position instead of showing it in its static spot.
• Keyframe times survive a project round-trip unchanged; projects saved before this release keep behaving exactly as they did.

Version 2.0

Added

• Pause and resume while recording — via a button, an in-app shortcut, or a system-wide hotkey. Paused time is removed from the finished video rather than recorded as dead air, and the webcam is re-timed to stay in sync.
• Countdown before recording — off / 3 / 5 / 10 seconds (default 3), so you can switch to the window you meant to capture. It closes before recording starts, so it never appears in the video.
• Global recording hotkeys — start/stop and pause/resume from anywhere, so stopping a recording no longer means alt-tabbing back into your own shot.
• Crash recovery — the open project is autosaved every 20 seconds while it has unsaved changes, and offered back on the next launch if the app didn’t close cleanly.
• Screen-only recordings are now placed on the timeline when you stop, matching what screen + webcam already did.
• BackendStudio Pro — the app stays free, and free exports now carry a “Created with BackendStudio” watermark; a one-time BackendStudio Pro add-on removes it. The preview is never watermarked, so editing stays clean, and a confirmed upgrade keeps working offline.
• A full user guide, and this changelog.

Changed

• Track lock now actually locks. A locked track refuses moves, trims, splits, deletes, merges, crossfades and pastes, and can’t be removed — and a refused edit says why in the status bar. Previously the button only toggled an icon.
• A chosen export encoder in Preferences is now applied to the matching video format instead of being ignored for HEVC, and both format families are listed.
• Timeline markers are labelled M1, M2, M3… and shown on the ruler, and the timeline zoom buttons reach the full range.
• The welcome screen’s Record quick-start now opens the recording panel.

Fixed

• Webcam reliability — a failed camera open was silent, the preview didn’t recover after a device was lost, and camera enumeration could hang. Webcam failure is now reported and never costs you the screen recording.
• Leaving voice-over now restores your own microphone setting instead of arming the mic for the next screen recording, and colour adjustment (brightness / contrast / saturation) works reliably.

Version 1.0.1

Recording

• Screen capture — record any display, choose the frame rate, and capture system audio, microphone narration and an optional webcam/camera overlay (with a live camera preview) together.
• Smooth, in-sync footage — constant-frame-rate pacing keeps audio and video aligned, with a live elapsed timer while you record.
• Straight into the project — each recording is saved as an MP4 and lands in the media bin, ready to edit.

Media & timeline

• Import video, audio and images by drag-and-drop or a file picker; the media bin shows a thumbnail, resolution and duration, with waveforms for audio.
• Multi-track timeline — stacked video and audio tracks with a ruler, draggable playhead and zoom; per-track mute / solo / lock.
• Place & trim — drag clips to position them, trim with edge handles, and snap to the playhead and neighbouring clip edges (hold Shift to disable snapping).

Editing

• Split at the playhead, copy / paste, merge adjacent same-source clips, move clips between tracks, and delete.
• Non-destructive — edits use in/out points and never modify your original files.
• Full undo / redo across edits and drag gestures.
• Clip adjustments in the Inspector — reposition, scale and rotate (picture-in-picture), opacity, colour (brightness / contrast / saturation), playback speed, volume and fades.
• Titles & transitions — add titles, and crossfade / dissolve between clips, from dedicated Titles, Effects and Transitions panels.

Preview, audio & export

• Preview a single clip, or Composite the whole timeline (all tracks combined) and scrub through it before exporting.
• Audio — per-clip volume, fade in / out, and track mute / solo, mixed down to a single track on export.
• Export the entire timeline to one MP4 at your chosen resolution and frame rate, hardware-accelerated for fast rendering, with a progress bar and a Show in folder action when it finishes.

Projects & reliability

• Projects — save and reopen your work; a welcome screen offers New / Open / Recent.
• Autosave & crash recovery — your progress is saved periodically and offered back after an unexpected close; saves are written atomically so a crash can’t corrupt a project.
• Clear feedback — a completion banner after export and recording, with a friendly message on failure and a “Show in folder” action on success.
• Private by design — 100% offline; no account, no cloud upload, no telemetry.