Editorial

A few terms make the rest easy:

• Cut — the asset you're editing: the whole ordered assembly.
• Clip — one row in the cut. It points at a source shot rather than a frozen file.
• Slot — the source shot a clip references; a clip resolves the slot's published take.
• Take — a published version of a shot. A clip follows the latest take unless you pin it.
• Sequence — the flattened, back-to-back playback of all clips (what the play timeline shows).

The tab header shows a clip count, a Find a clip search box, and three buttons — Sync, Play timeline, and Actions. Below it, each clip is a row: drag handle, number, thumbnail, source name, a trim/fps summary, a version pill, a conform badge, a play-from-here button, and a ⋮ menu.

On a long sequence, type in Find a clip to narrow the list — it matches the shot name, code, stream, category, or media file name, and the header switches to "12 of 240 clips". Rows keep their real position numbers, so what you see is still where it sits in the cut. Filtering only hides rows; nothing about the cut changes. Drag-reorder is suspended while a search is active (the rows you see aren't neighbours any more) — press Esc or the ✕ to clear it and drag again.

1. Open Actions ▸ Add clips… to bring up the "Add clips" picker.
2. Check the shots you want (candidates with no published video show a red "no take" tag), then click Add — they append to the end of the cut.
3. To land clips at a specific spot instead of the bottom, use a clip's ⋮ menu ▸ Add clips above… / Add clips below… — the picker shows where the selection will land, and the rest of the cut ripples down.
4. Drag rows by the handle to reorder; the new order saves automatically.

Assembling from another cut. To build a teaser or alternate cut without re-cutting, switch the picker to From another cut, choose the source cut, and select the clips to bring over (click to toggle, shift-click for a run). Each copy carries its trim, tracked stream, pin, and on/off state, and lands at the same position the picker was opened from. By default copies keep tracking the latest published take like the original; tick Lock to current takes to freeze them to exactly what the source cut shows now. The copy is recorded in the cut's history as drawn from the source cut.

Nesting cuts (reels, long form). A cut can be a clip in another cut: build one cut per sequence, then a reel or film cut whose clips are those sequence cuts. In the "Add clips" picker a cut carries a cut tag and plays through its latest published render — so render the sequence and publish the .mp4 first, or it shows no render. When you publish a newer render, the reel's clip flags updated and conforms like any shot. A cut can never contain itself: the picker hides the cut and anything already above it. Rendering is on demand and publishing is deliberate, so a reel only ever sees approved renders. Each nested clip also shows which saved edit its render came from; if the sequence has a newer saved version than its published render, the row warns edit v5 ahead of render — render and publish that version to bring the reel forward.

A clip's ⋮ menu also offers Turn off / Turn on (an off clip is dimmed and excluded from playback and export, shown with an Off badge) and Remove from cut. An empty cut prompts you to "Add shots to build the cut, then drag to order and trim them."

Choose Trim from a clip's menu to open an inline, frame-accurate editor under the row. Set In and Out as frame numbers; a live readout shows the selected frames and seconds out of the clip's total. Save to apply, or Reset to clear back to the full clip. The row then summarizes the trim (e.g. "120–360 f · 10.0s").

The blue ▶ on a clip row is play from here: it opens the same player parked on that clip's first frame and starts playing, so you can review the back half of a long cut without scrubbing to it. The clip's ⋮ menu has the same action. Rows with no published take, or that are turned off, show the button greyed out — they aren't in the sequence.

Play timeline opens a full-screen player that runs every clip back-to-back on one global timeline with a single playhead — the live review tool (frame-exact continuous playback is the ffmpeg render). Video clips play their trimmed in→out; stills hold for a set number of seconds.

Transport controls (with keyboard shortcuts):

• Play / pause — Space.
• Step one frame back / forward — ← / →.
• Previous / next clip — Shift + ← / Shift + →.
• Go to start / end — Home / End.
• Split the current clip at the playhead — B (video clips only; makes two clips from the same take).
• Trim the current clip's head to the playhead — I (drops the frames in front of it).
• Trim its tail to the playhead — O (drops the frames after it).
• Clear the current clip's trim (the restore icon) — plays the whole take again.
• Set a loop range over the cut — Loop In / Loop Out ([ / ]), cleared with \.
• Turn looping on / off — L (the repeat icon; with no range set it loops the whole cut).
• Delete the clip at the playhead — Del (ripples, leaving no gap).
• Preview another published take of the current shot in place — ↑ newer / ↓ older, or the vN stepper in the transport. The picture swaps with the same trim and position; an amber PREVIEW tag shows it isn't saved. Use pins the clip to that take (the same as choosing it in the list); the undo arrow drops back to the clip's own take. Previews are forgotten when you close the player.
• Toggle a timecode / shot-name overlay burned into the picture.

The transport shows elapsed / total time and "Clip N / M" with the current shot name. The strip below is a scrub band — click or drag anywhere on it to seek. Each clip is a block sized by its duration, highlighted when current, with a colored top border showing its conform status. Flip on reorder mode (the swap icon) to drag blocks into a new order right on the timeline, with a blue insertion marker. When the cut contains stills, a Still hold control sets how many seconds each still lingers.

To watch one section over and over, park the playhead and click Loop In ([), then park it at the end and click Loop Out (]). Playback cycles between the marks; the range is drawn on the timeline as an amber band with handles you can drag, and the two timecodes next to the buttons jump the playhead to either mark.

Because clips reference slots, a cut auto-conforms to the latest published take of each shot — publish a new take and the cut picks it up, no re-linking. Each clip's badge shows its state:

To fix a clip to a specific take, use the version pill — the up/down chevrons Upgrade / Degrade one take at a time, or click the pill for Choose version, where "Latest published"auto-follows and any vN pins it (a pin icon marks a pinned clip). Each take in that list shows a swatch, its date and its publish note; the eye icon opens the take in the file viewer so you can watch it before choosing — arrow through the ladder there and press Use this version to pin the clip to the take on screen. Track stream narrows which stream on the slot a clip follows.

A version freezes the current assembly as an immutable snapshot you can re-render or roll back to:

• Actions ▸ Save version — name it (optional); Loft records the clip count and notes any unresolved clips as gaps.
• Actions ▸ Version history… — the Cut versions list shows each snapshot's clips, gaps, resolution@fps, and render count.
• Per version: Render re-renders that frozen assembly to a new .mp4; Restore replaces the working cut with that version (confirmed first).

All under Actions ▸ Export & deliver:

• Export video… — opens the Export cut dialog: an Output name (auto-timestamped if blank), a Resolution (1080p, 720p, 4K, vertical, or square), an FPS (24 / 25 / 30 / 60), and Still hold for any stills. Render runs in the background like a generation: a "Rendering…" placeholder appears in the cut's Files and the Queue while it works, and the notification bell tells you when the .mp4 is ready (or why it failed). Include audio (on by default) carries each clip's own sound into the .mp4 — stills, silent takes and muted clips get silence; untick it for a video-only render. Music and voice-over live in the Audio section below.
• Mute a clip — the speaker icon on a clip row (or Mute audio in its ⋯ menu) keeps its picture but silences it in the player, the render, and the EDL (a V-only event instead of AA/V).
• Audio section (below the clip list) — music, voice-over or ambience tracks that sit under the picture. Add audio… lists every asset in the project with a published audio take (.wav / .mp3 / .m4a…). Each track has a Start time on the timeline, optional source In/Out, a Gain in dB, mute, on/off and remove. Tracks play in the timeline player (lanes under the clip strip) and are mixed into the render when Include audio is on; Download package bundles them in an audio/ folder with a CUE_SHEET.txt, since a CMX3600 EDL can't carry them. Tracks anchor to absolute timeline time — re-cutting the picture doesn't move them.
• Export EDL — writes a CMX3600 EDL and reports the event count.
• Turnover — the handoff to a finishing editor. Saves a new cut version, then writes a turnover/ folder under the cut: a media/ pool of the source takes (filenames carry the shot and the take's code, so they never change and a take reused later maps to the same file), plus this version's .edl and a manifest. Run it again after re-cutting and only the new takes are added — an editor's Resolve or Premiere project relinks the new EDL against the same pool with no manual relinking. The folder is what a sandbox syncs to the editor.
• Finishing files — the editor's own project (a Resolve .drp, a Premiere .prproj, a Final Cut .fcpxml) lives under the cut, like any DCC file. Every new cut starts with a finishing/ and a conform/ folder (project files in, timeline exports back). Upload the project into finishing/ from the Files tab; uploads never overwrite, so name iterations yourself (Reel_01_v002.prproj). Uploaded files are yours alone until you select them and Publish — that copies the file into the cut's pub/ folder and stamps the next version number. A turnover takes the newest published project per NLE and the package ships it under finishing/. The next editor imports the project, sees the media offline (different machine), and relinks once against media/ — the code in every filename makes that unambiguous. Note: Final Cut Pro cannot import a CMX3600 EDL; FCP editors work from the .fcpxml until FCPXML turnover lands.
• Download package… — opens a dialog, then runs a turnover and zips it: media/, audio/ with a CUE_SHEET.txt, the .edl, the manifest and any published finishing/ project files, with the same filenames as the turnover folder. Scope decides how much media travels. Everything is the full pool. Changes since turnover vN is the update case: the editor already has v3 in Premiere or Resolve, so the package carries only the takes v3's manifest lacks, plus the full current EDL and manifest, plus a CHANGES.txt listing each shot's old filename → new filename (the Replace With Clip list; nothing is renamed, the old file stays in her pool). Changed in the last N days is the fallback when nobody knows which turnover she pulled. The dialog previews the list before you download. Include toggles drop media, audio or finishing files. Save a new cut version is on by default; untick it for a working package (written as _wip files, no version minted, not a baseline for later updates).
• Changed filter — the 1d / 3d / 7d / 14d chips beside Find a clip show only clips whose take was published in that window, the same clock as the package dialog's day scope. Click the active chip again to clear it.

Rendered outputs land in the cut's Files tab, where you can play, download, or publish them. Progress shows as the button's label (e.g. "Exporting…") with a summary when it finishes.

View clip (per row) and Actions ▸ Inspect framesopen the full-screen file viewer over the cut's media; Open source asset jumps to the shot a clip came from. Turn on Syncin the header to share the session in real time — presence avatars show who's here, and in a synced play timeline everyone's transport (play, pause, scrub) stays together.