A video editor built on a Rust core

What works today ​

• Editing — ripple delete and trim, roll, slip, slide, multi-selection, groups, clipboard, markers, snapping and zoom, paste attributes, with one pointer path for mouse, pen and finger. Lockable tracks, enforced by a single gate in front of the whole command dispatch.
• Compound clips — fold a selection into one clip; the picture is proven not to change. Fade, blend, grade, crop or dissolve the compound and it is isolated on a surface of its own first, so all five meet the composed group once rather than each clip in it.
• Playback — WebCodecs into a WebGL2 compositor, audio clock leading, frame-accurate transport.
• Geometry on the picture — a box on the frame with corner and rotation handles, its corners computed from the very matrix the compositor hands the GPU, and the motion path a series of position keys traces, sampled from the core rather than drawn corner to corner.
• Cuts found by looking — a card off a camera is one file with a dozen takes in it; the scan reads every frame and splits where the picture changes far more than it did around it, in one undo step.
• Surround — stereo or 5.1, a position per track rather than a knob between two speakers, pairwise constant-power placement, and an LFE send that is a band.
• Noise reduction — spectral, learned from the pauses in the clip itself: the noise inside a voice's own band drops by more than 9 dB while the voice stays within 2 dB.
• Motion blur — a shutter per clip, averaged over eight real instants of the exposure: the layer's own path and whatever the material did between them, in the preview and in the file.
• Effects and transitions — sixteen effects, seven transitions (any of them on every cut in one choice), masks, a text generator, colour curves and lift/gamma/gain wheels, chosen from a browser whose every tile is that effect's own shader over the current frame. Every parameter keyframable, including a clip's position, scale and rotation, all resolved in the Rust core so the preview and the export read the same values.
• Colour and sound finishing — waveform, vectorscope and histogram; curves, lift/gamma/gain and .cube lookup tables that travel inside the project file; a mixer with live meters, EQ, low cut, high cut, compressor and limiter, loudness normalisation, ducking, silence detection and a marker on every beat.
• Subtitles — SRT and WebVTT in and out, on a caption track of their own.
• Classical editing — freeze frames, in and out points, insert and overwrite, J/K/L, adjustment tracks, speed ramps whose time mapping is an integral rather than a multiplication.
• Proxies — anything taller than 720 pixels is transcoded once into a 720p copy the preview decodes; the export always reads the original, proven on the written file by ffprobe and ffmpeg.
• Audio — mixer with volume, pan, mute and solo, fades as automation, waveforms, EBU R128 loudness checked against the Tech 3341 cases.
• Export — MP4 or WebM in a worker, with progress and a cancel that stops it.
• The tool next door — read and write .audiola, so a mix from Audiola arrives as audio tracks and the sound of a cut leaves for it.
• Hand the cut on — an EDL, FCPXML for Resolve and Final Cut, or Final Cut Pro 7 XML, which is the file Premiere Pro imports as a real sequence. The assembly travels; the grade is done there.
• Another shape in one press — portrait, square or 4:5, with every clip scaled to cover the new frame in the same undo step.
• Templates — fifteen of them across five categories, each card a rendered picture rather than a painted promise. Every placeholder is optional, so a template works before a single file has been imported and comes back as its graphics; and the wizard's last step can add it to the project already open, as tracks of its own, in one press of undo.
• An API, an MCP server and a CLI — the whole command catalogue, generated from the Rust enum, plus stills and audio peaks so an agent can look at what it just did.
• Installable and offline — a manifest and a service worker: the browser build installs as an application, opens without a network, and offers a reload when a new build is waiting.
• Self-hosting — one Node process serving the editor, the API, MCP and the CLI. Install it with Docker, the Unraid template, the Umbrel app, or a Proxmox script that builds the container for you; a server bundle needing nothing but Node 22 is attached to every release.
• Phone, tablet and desktop — the same code, panels taking turns where there is no room.

What is not there yet ​

The magnetic timeline is deliberately absent, and the editing chapter argues why. FFmpeg is not bundled; the export uses the browser's own encoders.

The architecture chapter marks, decision by decision, which parts of the design are built and which are planned.

The editor ​

Theme and language switch without a reload. Every user-visible string comes from a catalogue, including the errors the Rust core reports as codes.

From the same workshop

Audiola

The audio tool next door — and where Videola's own audio work comes from.

audiola.de →