Editing

The Edit sub-mode is Kitlig's timeline: a player, a media bin, and multi-track lanes for video and audio. It's the same document Storyboard, Assistant Editor, and Redub all work on, so a shot generated in Storyboard or a cut drafted by the Assistant Editor lands here as real clips.

The player

When you open a timeline, Kitlig reads the audio for the next 30 seconds first, before any thumbnails or waveforms further along. A small Loading audio 3 of 7 bar sits over the picture while it does, counting the files it needs from where the playhead is, and goes away when they're ready. It comes back if you jump somewhere that hasn't loaded yet. You can press play at any time: the picture starts straight away, and a clip whose audio arrives late joins in at the right moment, so it stays in sync.

The player has no single video element sitting behind it. Two hidden video elements swap under the playhead as playback crosses from one source clip to another, so intercutting footage from different files never black-flashes between cuts. Audio plays through its own mix graph, not the video elements directly. Where no video clip sits under the playhead, in a gap between clips or after the last one, the player shows black, the same as the export does. A one-line subtitle shows the current clip's transcript, resolved from whichever analyzed sequence that footage originally came from, so subtitles keep working even for a clip dragged in from another sequence.

Five capture buttons sit at the right end of the transport bar. Copy frame to clipboard and Save Screenshot grab the frame as it appears in the player, so a quick still is one click away. The other three decode the exact frame from the clip's source file with ffmpeg and register it as an image asset in the project, with lineage back to that source, the same way the Source Monitor's Screenshot button works. Screenshot to project stops there. Edit Frame also selects the new asset in Sandbox mode, where the image operations and AI edits live. Open Frame in Canvas opens it as a new layered canvas for painting, masks and adjustment layers. Park the playhead over a video clip first; a gap has nothing to capture.

Optimized media

Clips from AI video generators often have a keyframe only once every few seconds, sometimes one in a whole ten-second clip. A keyframe is a frame the decoder can start from, so every jump of the playhead into such a clip has to decode from the start of it. That is what makes the player stutter or freeze when you scrub generated footage.

Optimize Media makes an edit-friendly copy of a video: the same frames, with a keyframe every half second. The player and the timeline thumbnails use the copy; your original file is never touched, and Export Media always renders from the originals.

To optimize footage:

1. Right-click a video in the Media Bin, the Library, or a clip on the timeline.
2. Choose Optimize Media. On the timeline, with clips picked by Ctrl + click, it optimizes every selected clip's footage at once.
3. The clip shows OPT… while the copy is made and OPT once the player is using it. The picture switches over as soon as the copy is ready, with no reload.

The OPT button in the transport bar switches between optimized and original media for the whole project, so you can compare the two on the spot. Its count shows how many of the sequence's clips have a copy. The arrow next to it has Optimize all clips in this sequence, Optimized Media settings… and Clear optimized media….

Settings ▸ Optimized Media holds the choices for the open project:

• Resolution: full size by default, or half, quarter, up to 1080p or up to 720p. A copy is never bigger than its original.
• Quality and Keyframes: a keyframe every half second scrubs smoothly; every frame makes seeks instant at about three times the file size.
• Auto-optimize: Generated clips (the default) optimizes the videos that AI generations and lip sync produce, as they land. All video also does every video you import. Clips that already have a keyframe at least every second are skipped.
• Clear optimized media… deletes every copy and tells you how much disk it frees. Remove Optimized Media on a right-click menu does it for one clip.

Changing these settings does not remake the copies you have. They keep playing, shown dimmed on the timeline, until you optimize them again; Re-optimize outdated does them all.

Colour is kept exactly. A copy carries the same colour tags as its original, so it looks the same in the player and through a grade. 10-bit and HDR (HLG or PQ) footage stays 10-bit in a VP9 or AV1 copy; ordinary 8-bit footage becomes H.264. If the original file changes, for example after Reload from Disk or an in-place rotate, the copy is thrown away and the player goes back to the original until you optimize it again.

Note

Some clips can't be optimized: floating-point and 12-bit footage, and clips that are both transparent and deeper than 8-bit. They play from the original. A transparent 8-bit clip becomes a VP9 .webm copy, which keeps its alpha. Copies are a cache: backups leave them out, so a restored project plays the originals until you optimize again.

Copy frame to clipboard and Save Screenshot grab what the player shows, so with a reduced-resolution copy they come out at that size. Screenshot to project, Edit Frame and Open Frame in Canvas always decode the original.

Media Bin

The left panel lists every video, audio and image asset in the project, with a search box and all / video / audio / image / generators filter tabs. Import brings a file in from disk.

Two menus under the tabs get you to the right clip in a big project:

• The first narrows the list by where an asset came from. Generated shows what generations and operations made, marked with a small spark on the row, and Source shows the files you imported or pasted. All media shows both.
• The second sets the order: Recent (newest first, with the date on each row), Oldest, Name (shot2 comes before shot10) or Type (video, then audio, then images).

Each project remembers these two choices. They work together with the tabs, the search box and the active bin.

Drag an asset onto a lane: video and images go on video lanes, audio on audio lanes. Files work from outside Kitlig too: drop them on a lane and they join the project and land on the timeline one after another, or drop them on the Media Bin to just add them. Kitlig then asks whether to describe and analyze the new pictures. Double-click a video or audio asset to open it in the Source Monitor and mark a range first. Double-click an image to look at it there before adding it.

The two buttons beside the sort menu switch the list between rows with thumbnails and a table. The table works like an editor's project panel: one striped row per file, with its resolution, frame rate, duration, video codec and pixel format, sound (sample rate, channels, codec), bit rate, size and format. Click a column title to sort by it, and click again to reverse. The name column stays put while you scroll sideways. Rows fill in as they scroll into view, because Kitlig reads each file itself, so the details are true even for a file that came from somewhere else.

In the list, click an asset to see the same details in the Info strip at the bottom of the Media Bin. A line under the name sums it up (3840×2160 · 23.98 fps · h264 · 48 kHz stereo). Click Info for the full table, which adds the pixel format and bit depth, colour tags, timecode, and each stream's bit rate.

To go the other way, select a clip on the timeline and press F (match frame): the Source Monitor opens on that clip's source file with the in and out points set to the part the clip uses, parked where the timeline playhead sits inside it. From there you can widen the range and add it again, or grab a frame.

Describing footage with AI

Every image and video can carry a description and search tags, written by a vision model: right-click an item and choose Analyze with AI, or press the Analyze button (its badge counts what is left) to describe everything in view that has none yet. A video is shown to the model as a strip of frames with their times, plus a local transcript when the clip has speech, so besides the description and tags it gets a list of timestamped moments ("0:00–0:04 wide of the kitchen, 0:04–0:09 close-up of hands plating"). The tags show under each item, the search box matches descriptions and tags, and the Clip panel shows the same text for the selected clip, where you can edit it by hand (an edit survives a re-analysis). The editing agents read these too: that is how "find me the shot of the plate landing" works without anyone watching the footage. Each analysis is one paid call to the model set in Settings ▸ Agents ▸ Asset Analysis; the same panel can describe every new import automatically.

Image, colour and text clips

For pictures a Lottie can't make, a shader clip runs GLSL on the timeline with inputs you set, and can read your images, videos and .glb models. A Lottie animation (a .json from After Effects or LottieFiles) becomes a motion-graphics clip that plays live and renders in the export, and any clip's position, scale, rotation and opacity can be keyframed in the Keyframes drawer: see Motion graphics.

A still image dropped on a video lane becomes a clip that holds the picture for five seconds. Trim it to any length: a still has no end to run into. It exports like any other clip, letterboxed into the frame if its shape differs.

The Generators tab holds two clips that come from nothing. Drag a chip onto a video lane, or press its + to add it at the playhead on the selected clip's lane (or the first video lane).

• Colour clip: a solid colour the size of the frame. Pick the colour in the Clip panel. Useful under a title, as a slate, or as a background behind a scaled-down picture.
• Text clip: a title. The Clip panel's Text section has the words, the font, the size (as a share of the frame height, so it scales with the export), colour, alignment, bold and italic, line spacing, and an optional box behind the text. The player redraws the title as you type; the picture the export uses is written a moment after you stop.
• Title presets: lower thirds with one, two or three tiers (name, role, a subtitle line) on a translucent bar, the music-video stack (artist, song, album, bottom-left), a centred title and a boxed caption. Each is a chip in the Generators tab and a choice in the Text section's Preset picker. A preset title is made of lines, each with its own size, weight and colour (add or remove lines in the panel); Anchor places the block (bottom-left, top-centre…) with a margin from the edges, and Bar draws the band behind it. Once you have a look you like, type a name and Save as preset: it joins the Generators tab under My presets for this project.
• Timecode: a burnt-in clock. The player shows it live; Export Media draws one small image per frame at the export's rate and places it where the clip's anchor says. Timeline time counts from the sequence start, Clip time from the clip's own first frame.

None of these has sound, and the operations in the Clip panel (Augment, Lip Sync and the rest) work on footage only, so they stay hidden for stills, colours and titles.

The Clip panel

The Clip panel holds everything about the selected clip, in groups. A row of icons along the top sorts the groups into categories. Hover an icon to see what it holds:

• All: every group at once.
• Clip: where it plays, its description and its versions.
• Content: the colour, text, shader or animation a generated clip draws.
• Transform and motion: position, scale, rotation, entrances and exits.
• Look: blend mode, opacity and the colour grade.
• Timing: speed and fades.
• Audio: volume and fades, for a clip on an audio lane.
• AI and operations: references, Edit Frame with AI, and the operations that make new versions.

A clip only shows the icons it has something for. Click a group's title to fold it away. Kitlig remembers the icon you picked and the groups you folded, so the panel stays the way you set it as you click from clip to clip.

Tools

Four mutually exclusive tools, shown as buttons on the toolbar:

• Select (V): move clips, or drag an edge to trim within the media's own bounds.
• Blade (B or C): click a clip to cut it at that point.
• Roll (N): drag the cut between two adjacent clips; both sides adjust up to their own media limits.
• Retime (R): drag a clip's right edge to play the same footage over a new length. See Speed and retiming.

Split (S) cuts every clip under the playhead at once, on whichever tool you're using. A Blade click snaps the same way a drag does: within a few pixels of the playhead or of another clip's edge, the cut lands exactly there, so park the playhead where you want the cut and click near it. Delete removes the selection; select a gap instead of a clip and the button becomes a ripple delete, closing that gap and pulling everything after it earlier.

Bins

A bin is a named set of assets — a virtual folder, nothing moves on disk. The Bins row under the Media Bin's tabs has a chip per bin: click one to show only its assets, drop an asset card on a chip to add it, right-click a card to tick it into (or out of) any bin, and right-click a chip to rename, recolour or delete it. Bins are also how you point the assistant at material: "use the shots in the Food bin".

Editing with the Assistant

The Assistant (and an agent connected over MCP) has the same timeline in hand: it reads the lanes and clips, lays footage and titles, trims, moves, splits, adds markers, saves versions and exports. Its edits show up live, each one is an undo step, and each of its turns is saved as a minor version. See Assistant ▸ Editing the timeline by conversation. The toolbar's Reel button hands the sequence to the Reel Editor persona, which cuts a music-driven reel from a bin: Reel editing with the Assistant.

Subtitles

Right-click an audio lane (its header, or empty space on the lane) and choose Generate Subtitle Track…. Pick a style (a boxed caption at the bottom, a full-width lower band, or plain text), the characters per line (preset to what fits the sequence frame: a few words per line on a 9:16 reel, a full sentence on 16:9) and lines per cue, and press Generate. The job reads the speech of every clip on that lane: a clip's own transcript when it was imported through Redub, an earlier transcription of the same file, or a fresh local Whisper pass when there is none yet (set a Whisper model in Settings ▸ Local Inference first). The words are cut into readable cues, which land as ordinary text clips on a Subtitles video lane at the top of the timeline, one per cue, so you can retime, reword or delete any of them like a title. The lane also keeps an SRT of the cues as a text asset. Running it again on the same lane replaces the Subtitles lane rather than adding a second one, and Ctrl+Z removes it.

Versions

The Versions menu beside the sequence name (it shows the current number, v1.2, with a dot when the sequence has changed since) keeps snapshots of the sequence, like commits. Type what changed and Save makes the next major version (1.2 → 2.0); Minor makes a small step (1.2 → 1.3), which is also what the assistant does on its own edits. The list shows every version with its author, date, note, clip count and length; Switch makes one the live sequence again (your unsaved changes are kept as an automatic minor version first, so nothing is lost) and Ctrl+Z undoes the switch. Versions live in the project folder as plain JSON next to the sequence, so a project kept under git diffs cleanly; Kitlig itself never runs git.

Selecting several clips

Drag across empty lane space with the Select tool to draw a box; every clip it touches, on any lane, joins the selection (hold Shift to add to what is already selected). Ctrl+A selects every clip on the timeline, Ctrl-click adds or removes one, and Esc clears the lot. The selection moves as a group: drag any member and they all follow, including across lanes, and the lanes you are heading for show a dashed outline where each clip will land — brass when the lane takes it, red when it is the wrong kind (a picture clip over an audio lane), in which case that clip keeps its own lane at the new time. Delete, copy, paste, duplicate and the Clip panel's Transform all act on the whole selection, and one Ctrl+Z undoes the lot.

Selecting in the player

The box works in the player too. Drag across the picture and every clip it touches at the playhead joins the selection, each one outlined in brass while the player is paused. A title counts by its words and not by the whole frame. Hold Shift to add to what is already selected.

Drag a selected picture to move it; with several selected, they all move together in one undo step. A press anywhere else starts a box, and Ctrl + drag starts one even over a selected picture, which is how you box-select when a full-frame clip is selected. A click with no drag still plays and pauses.

Moving tracks and clips between tracks

The eye on a video track's header hides that lane in the player and in Export ▾ Media…. Audio lanes keep their speaker for mute.

Drag a track's header up or down to move the track. A brass line across the headers and lanes shows where it will land, the list scrolls by itself when you hold the pointer at its top or bottom edge, and Esc calls the drag off. Select several headers first and they travel together. Up and Down in the track's right-click menu still move it one place.

To move clips, right-click one and choose Send to Track…, then pick the lane. It takes the whole selection when the clip you right-clicked is part of it. Clips keep their times, and a clip only goes to a lane of its own kind, so with sound and picture selected a video lane reads "2 of 3" and the sound stays where it is. A linked partner stays on its own lane too.

Adding padding

Add Padding opens empty time at the playhead on every lane at once, for when a shot, a title or a beat needs room. Park the playhead, right-click the ruler, a clip or empty lane space, and choose Left… or Right… under Add Padding. Type the amount in seconds or frames, then click Add Padding.

• Right moves everything after the playhead later.
• Left moves everything before the playhead earlier.

Clips under the playhead are cut there, so the time really is empty. Markers, the in and out points and review comments all move with the timeline. Something exactly at the playhead counts as after it. One Ctrl+Z undoes all of it, comments included.

Note

A timeline has nothing before 0. When Left has less room than you asked for, the rest of the gap comes from moving everything after the playhead later, and the dialog tells you before you apply it. A timeline that starts at 0 has no room at all, so Left then works like Right.

A clip with keyframes carries on across the gap from where it was cut.

Comments

Click Comments in the toolbar to leave a note on a frame, draw on the picture, and answer what others have said, from the app or a phone. See Review comments.

Getting around

The player has Previous frame and Next frame buttons beside the play controls, and the arrow keys do the same anywhere in Edit. Each step plays the sound under the new frame, so you can line a cut up by ear.

The time above the track headers is where the playhead sits. Hold Alt and click it to switch between a timecode and a frame number.

The full screen button in the player's transport fills the display with the picture and its controls. Press ` or Esc, or click it again, to come back.

Markers

Press M to drop a marker at the playhead, or double-click the ruler. Markers show as coloured flags on the ruler with a hairline down through the lanes; drag a flag to move it, click it to select it, and Shift+, / Shift+. jump to the previous / next one. The Markers panel (toolbar button) lists them in time order with their timecode; click a row to park the playhead there and edit the name, note and colour below, or press Delete to remove it. Export ▾ in the panel writes the list as CSV (time, timecode, duration, name, note, colour; the times are timeline seconds) or JSON, and Export ▾ FCP XML… carries them as sequence markers.

Right-click a video clip whose media was described with AI and choose Add Scene Markers to mark its scenes in one go: a blue range marker per scene the clip shows, named Scene 1, Scene 2 and so on, with what happens there as the note. A long video uses the scene changes found while it was described; a short one uses its timestamped moments. Running it again adds nothing twice.

Copy, paste and duplicate

Clips copy and paste within the app. Ctrl+C copies the selected clip (or the Ctrl+click set) together with its linked audio or video partner; Ctrl+V pastes the copies with the first one at the playhead, keeping their spacing, on the lanes they came from. Ctrl+D puts a copy right after the selected clip. Hold Ctrl while dragging a clip and a copy follows the pointer while the original stays put; drop it anywhere on the same lane or another lane of the same kind. The clip's right-click menu has the same three entries. Pasted clips land on top of anything already there, so they can overlap; the pasted clip is selected, ready to nudge or delete.

Copying a look to other clips

Right-click a picture clip for Fit Width, Fit Height and Center: the first two scale the picture so it spans the frame's width or height (a portrait phone clip on a landscape frame fills the height, a wide plate fills the width), the third puts it back in the middle. They write the same Transform values the Clip panel shows, so you can fine-tune afterwards.

Right-click a clip and choose Copy Attributes to remember its look. Then select the clips you want to match (drag a box, or Ctrl-click them), right-click one of them and choose Paste Attributes…, or press Ctrl+Alt+V. A short list lets you tick what to bring across:

• Text style: font, size, colour, alignment, bold and italic, line spacing, the box and bar behind the text, and where the title sits in the frame. Each title keeps its own words. A lower third's line styles (the bigger name line, the smaller role line) go onto the matching lines of the other title.
• Colour grade and LUT: every slider in the Color section plus the LUT and its intensity.
• Transform, Keyframes (the animated position, scale, rotation and opacity, as they are), Blend mode and opacity, Fades and Clip volume.

Each row says how many of the selected clips it fits. A text style only lands on titles, a grade only on footage and stills, and a volume only on sound clips, so you can select a mix of clips and paste safely. One Ctrl+Z undoes the whole paste. Copying a single clip with Ctrl+C also remembers its look, so Ctrl+C then Ctrl+Alt+V works the way it does in Premiere.

To match clips without the clipboard, select them and right-click one for Sync Clips. Every selected clip takes the look of the last one you chose: choose the clips with Ctrl-click and finish on the one to match. It doesn't matter which clip you right-click. After a box selection the last clip is the one on the top lane. Sync brings across everything each clip can use, with no list to tick, and it is a true match: a grade or transform the source doesn't have comes off the others. Each clip keeps its own words and media, and one Ctrl+Z undoes the lot.

Editing titles together works without the clipboard too. Select several text clips and open the Clip panel on one of them: the Text section reads "Text · 3 clips", and a change to the font, size, colour, box or position goes to all of them. Typing the words changes only the clip you're on. The Color section works the same way for footage.

Speed and retiming

A clip can play faster or slower than its footage. The Speed section of the Clip panel (double-click a video or audio clip) has the rate as a percentage: 200 % plays the footage at double speed, 50 % at half. The range is 25 % to 800 %. By default a speed change keeps the clip's length on the timeline and changes how much footage it covers: a 4 second clip at 200 % now plays 8 seconds of its source, and at 50 % it plays 2 seconds. If the footage runs out before the clip ends, the clip is shortened to where it does. Reset puts the clip back to 100 % at the same length.

Tick Keep media range and a speed change does the opposite: the clip keeps the footage it already shows and its length changes to fit, so 50 % makes it twice as long. Kitlig refuses the change when the longer clip would run into the next clip on its lane; move that clip first, or untick the box. A video clip and its linked audio clip change together either way. The sound speeds up or slows down with the picture, and its pitch moves with it, the way a tape does: faster is higher, slower is lower.

The Retime tool (R) does the same thing by hand. With it selected, drag a clip's right edge: the footage inside stays the same and the speed follows the new length, shown live on the clip as you drag (2×, 0.5×). Trimming with the Select tool is different: it reveals or hides footage at the edge and leaves the speed alone. A clip playing at anything other than 100 % shows a brass speed badge next to its name.

Speed is kept separate from the Keyframes drawer: keyframes animate the clip's position, scale, rotation, opacity or gain over the clip's own time, and that time runs at whatever speed the clip plays. The viewer, Export Media and the FCP XML export all follow the speed; the XML carries it as a constant-speed Time Remap, which Premiere and Resolve read.

Interpolate

Slowing footage down repeats frames: at 50 % every frame shows twice, which looks steppy on anything that moves. Interpolate, a tab in the Clip panel's Operations section, runs ffmpeg's motion-compensated frame interpolation on the clip's cut, locally and without credits, and lands the result as a version of the clip. Pick a Target Frame Rate (a fixed rate, or 2x source to double the file's own) and a Slow Down Factor; Keep Audio stretches the sound to match. For a clip you have already slowed, the tab offers to bake the clip's speed into the render: the version is made at the clip's current length with real in-between frames, and the clip goes back to 100 %, so it plays exactly as before but smooth. It also exists as a standalone operation, Edit Video ▸ Interpolate Frames (Local), in the Sandbox pickers and the Workflow palette.

Note

Interpolation estimates motion for every new frame, so it is slow on long clips, and fast cuts or large motions can smear. Run it on the cut you need, not on the whole source.

Clip volume

Each sound clip has its own level, applied before the channel's fader in the Mixer. Double-click an audio clip and set Gain in the Clip panel's Volume section, from -60 dB to +24 dB. Reset returns it to 0 dB.

The same level is a line across the clip on the timeline. Select the clip and drag the line up or down in half-dB steps; double-click it to go back to 0 dB. A clip that isn't selected shows the line only when its level isn't 0 dB.

To move the level over time, select the clip and open Keyframes. Audio clips have one row, Gain, in dB. Add keys there for a duck under a line of dialogue or a slow swell. Keys are spaced in dB, so a straight line between two keys sounds like an even fade. The clip then draws its curve instead of the line, and you edit it in the drawer rather than by dragging. With gain keyed, a change in the Clip panel writes a key at the playhead.

Keys stay with the sound. Trim the head of a clip, roll its cut or split it, and every moment keeps the level it had. Fades multiply with the keyed level. Paste Attributes carries a static clip volume but not gain keys.

Changing a clip's speed doesn't move its keys

Keys count seconds from the clip's start. If you retime a clip so its length changes, check the keys afterwards.

Fades

Click a clip's left or right edge (the trim handle, without dragging) to select that edge: it lights up brass. Press Ctrl+F and a half-second fade appears on that side; press it again to remove it. With a whole clip selected, Ctrl+F fades both ends. A linked video and audio pair fade together; Ctrl+Alt+F fades just the clip you clicked. A fade shows as a darkened corner with a diagonal line and a small square handle at the top: drag the handle to make the fade longer or shorter (it snaps to frames). The clip's right-click menu has Fade In and Fade Out, and the Clip panel has exact In and Out lengths in seconds.

A picture fade fades to transparent, so a clip on an upper lane fades to whatever is below it, and the bottom lane fades to black. A sound fade ramps the clip's volume. Both play in the viewer and render the same in Export Media.

Color

The Clip panel's Color section grades footage and stills the way Lumetri Color or Lightroom's basic panel does: Temperature, Tint, Exposure (in stops), Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation, Vibrance and Fade (lifted blacks). Drag a slider and the viewer updates as you drag; double-click a value to reset that slider, or press Reset for the whole grade. LUT applies a .cube file from the project, with an Intensity slider; the import button brings a new one in. With several clips selected the change goes to all of them, each keeping its other settings.

Under the sliders, Color wheels is a three-way colour corrector with one wheel each for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights (lift, gamma and gain in grading terms). Drag the dot on a wheel toward a colour to push that part of the picture toward it: the further from the centre, the stronger the push. Red sits at the top and the colours run clockwise through yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. The slider under each wheel brightens or darkens that range. Shadows moves the blacks and leaves white where it is, Highlights scales toward white and leaves black where it is, and Midtones bends the middle with both ends held. Double-click a wheel to clear its colour, the number under it to reset its brightness, or its name to reset both. A classic teal and orange look is a small push toward teal on Shadows and toward orange on Highlights.

Color tint washes the whole picture with one colour. Pick the Colour, then raise Strength; with Preserve luminosity on, each pixel keeps its brightness and only its colour changes. Strength at zero turns the tint off.

The sliders run first, then the wheels, then the tint, and the LUT comes last. The grade is baked into a colour lookup table that both the viewer and the export use, so the render looks like the viewer. HDR footage from cameras that record HLG (many Sony, Panasonic and phone clips) is graded after it is brought to normal brightness, the way the viewer shows it.

Transform

Every clip on a video lane has a Transform in the Clip panel: X and Y move the picture (as a share of the frame, so 50 % is half a frame), Scale sizes it (100 % fits the frame), Rotate turns it clockwise, and Reset puts it back. With the clip selected and the playhead over it, you can also drag the picture in the player to move it (Shift keeps one axis) and use the mouse wheel over the player to scale it.

Lanes stack: an upper lane sits over the lanes below it, in the player and in the export alike. A full-frame clip covers everything beneath; scale it down or move it aside and the lanes below show through around it, which is how a picture-in-picture or a title over footage is built. The letterbox bars of a clip whose shape differs from the frame are see-through as well.

Blend modes and opacity

The Clip panel's Compositing section sets how a picture clip mixes with the lanes below it. Pick a blend mode from the list and set Opacity as a percentage; Reset puts it back to Normal at 100 %. Opacity multiplies with the clip's fades, so a 50 % clip fading in climbs from nothing to half strength.

Put the overlay on a lane above your footage and choose the mode that suits it:

• Overlay or Soft Light for a film grain or texture plate shot on mid grey. The grey disappears and only the grain stays.
• Screen or Add (Linear Dodge) for light leaks, lens flares and dust shot on black. The black disappears and the light brightens the shot.
• Multiply for paper, dirt or vignettes shot on white. The white disappears and the darker parts darken the shot.
• Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Hard Light, Difference and Exclusion work as they do in Photoshop or After Effects.

The modes blend with whatever is below, so a blended clip on the bottom lane blends with black. Transparent parts of the clip (a scaled-down picture, the letterbox bars, a fade) leave the lanes below untouched. The viewer and Export Media use the same formulas, so the render matches what you see.

Note

Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity aren't offered on the timeline yet, only in Canvas. Copy Attributes carries the blend mode and opacity to other clips like any other part of a clip's look.

In and out points

Press I to set the in point at the playhead and O for the out point, or use the In and Out buttons in the toolbar. The range shows as a brass band on the ruler, the lanes outside it dim, and a chip in the toolbar reads the two times; its × clears them. Setting a side that would cross the other clears that other side. The range never limits playback or editing, it only tells Export Media what to render: the dialog gains an Export the in/out range only checkbox, on by default while a range is set.

Note

The range is saved with the sequence, so it's still there when you come back.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
V	Select tool
B / C	Blade tool
N	Roll tool
R	Retime tool
S	Split every clip at the playhead
Space	Play or pause
K	Pause
L	Play
I / O	Set the in / out point at the playhead
Q / W	Trim the selected clip's start / end to the playhead
[ / ]	Nudge the selected clip's start (Shift for ×10)
, / .	Jump to the previous / next cut
Home / End	Jump to the start / end of the timeline
Del / Backspace	Delete the selection (clips, a marker), or ripple-delete a selected gap
Ctrl+A	Select every clip
Esc	Clear the selection, or cancel a track drag
M	Add a marker at the playhead
Shift+, / Shift+.	Jump to the previous / next marker
Left / Right	Step one frame back / forward, playing the sound under it (Shift for 10 frames)
Alt+, / Alt+.	Jump to the previous / next keyframe (on the selected clip, or anywhere when nothing is selected)
`	Full screen on or off (Esc also leaves it)
Ctrl+, / Ctrl+.	Jump to the previous / next comment
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V	Copy the selected clip(s); paste them at the playhead
Ctrl+D	Duplicate the selected clip right after itself
Ctrl+Alt+V	Paste Attributes: pick which parts of the copied clip's look go onto the selected clips
Ctrl+F	Fade the selected clip edge in or out (or both ends of the selected clip); press again to remove
Ctrl+Alt+F	The same, without fading the linked audio or video partner
Ctrl + drag	Drag a copy of a clip. In the player, draw a selection box even over a selected picture

These are scoped to Edit and are disabled while you're typing in a field.

Clip references and frame edits

Select a video clip to open its Clip panel; it closes again when nothing is selected. The References section holds the images that belong with that clip. Add Asset picks project images; each thumbnail opens in Sandbox mode when clicked, and the × removes it. The same list feeds the Augment operation's reference images.

Edit Frame with AI makes a new image from one of the clip's frames. Choose an image edit engine, write a prompt, pick Clip start or Playhead (the playhead has to sit over the clip), and run it. Kitlig pulls that exact frame from the clip's source file, sends it to the engine together with the clip's references, and the result joins the references with a sparkle badge. Cutting the clip afterwards keeps the images on every piece.

Note

A generated version plays in step with the clip it was made for. Cut or trim the clip after the version lands and each piece keeps playing its own stretch of the generated video, so the second half no longer restarts from the beginning.

Lip sync and extend

The Operations section of the Clip panel also has Lip Sync and Extend tabs.

Lip Sync re-animates the mouth in the clip to a new audio track and lands the result as a version, like Augment. With Use timeline mix ticked, Kitlig renders the audible audio lanes under the clip's range and syncs to that, so a dialogue line you have already cut in on an audio lane is all it needs; solo that lane first so the music bed stays out of it. Untick it to pick an audio file instead, for example a clean dialogue stem. The audio plays from the file's start and is padded with silence or cut to the clip's length.

Extend generates footage that continues past the clip's last frame. Write what happens next, pick an engine, and run it. The new footage lands as a new clip right after this one on the same lane, named after the clip with "(extended)"; when the engine also made sound, that goes on the nearest audio lane as a linked clip, the same as dropping a video. Clips after it do not move, so make room first if the lane is full there. The engines take at most 15 seconds of source, so a longer clip sends only its tail.

Overlapping clips

Two clips can overlap on the same video lane, for example when you drop a clip onto a lane that already has one there. The clip you placed last is on top, and that is what plays and what Export ▾ Media… renders; the clip underneath shows again where the top one ends. Mute the top clip to see the one below it without moving anything.

Frame size

The Frame button in the toolbar sets the sequence's output size: a preset such as 16:9 1920×1080 or 9:16 1080×1920, a custom width and height, or Match first clip, which takes the size from the first clip's footage (a phone clip shot upright counts as upright). The preview letterboxes to that shape, so a 9:16 edit looks on screen the way it will export, and clips that don't fit the frame get black bars on either side, in the preview and in the export alike.

Export

Export ▾ Media… renders the timeline to one video file. It runs from the start to the end of the last clip on any lane, so a music track that carries on after the last shot plays over black rather than being cut off; set an in/out range to export less. Every cut lands on the frame it belongs to: a clip whose generated version came back a little short holds its last frame rather than pulling everything after it earlier.

Pick a Quality and click Export. Each one is an H.264 mp4 at a fixed bitrate, and the dialog shows the rate and about how big the file will be:

Quality	Bitrate at 1080p	Good for
High	12 Mbps	Final delivery and uploads
Medium	6 Mbps	Reviews and sharing
Low	3 Mbps	Small files and quick checks
Terrible	1 Mbps	The smallest, fastest rough cut. It looks blocky

The bitrate goes up with the frame above 1080p, so High on a 4K sequence is 48 Mbps. Kitlig reads the size from the sequence's Frame setting. With Match first clip it assumes 1080p, so set a Frame on a 4K timeline, or use Advanced.

Advanced opens the full controls, filled in from the Quality you picked. The Frame row uses the sequence's frame size unless you pick another one for this render. The codec can be H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1 or lossless FFV1 (the same choices as the Re-encode tool), with a speed preset for H.264 and H.265 and an optional target bitrate; empty the bitrate for a quality-targeted encode. Simple takes you back to Quality, and any Frame or Colour you changed still applies. The file type follows the codec: mp4 for H.264, H.265 and AV1, webm for VP9, mkv for FFV1. The finished file lands in the project's exports folder, named after the sequence (a second render of the same sequence gets a -2 suffix), so it shows under Exports in Asset mode and on the phone companion. The Colour row in Advanced picks the delivery colour. Rec.709 SDR (the default) is the normal web and phone format and looks like the viewer: HLG camera footage is converted the same way the viewer shows it, instead of coming out flat and grey. Keep HDR (HLG) writes an HDR file for HDR screens, with any normal clips lifted into it. Either way the file is labelled with its colour space so players don't have to guess. The Bit depth row picks 8-bit (the default, plays everywhere and can use your GPU's encoder) or 10-bit, which keeps smoother gradients and shader output at the cost of a slower software encode; H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1 and FFV1 all have a 10-bit form, and shader clips are drawn in 16-bit for it.

The audio is rendered by the same engine the viewer plays through, so track levels, clip gain and its keyframes, the compressor, limiter, reverb, pan, clip fades and the Mixer's master level come out exactly as you hear them. Timelines longer than 20 minutes use ffmpeg's mixer instead, which follows the same settings closely but not to the sample.

Export ▾ FCP XML… writes a Final Cut Pro 7 interchange file (the format Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut 7 all read), probing each distinct source file first, then asks where to save it. Image clips and text clips go across as stills with a transparent background (a title is its rendered picture, redrawn first so it matches its current look at the sequence's frame size); colour clips and timecode clips have no file to point at and are left out. Each Subtitles lane is also written as an .srt file next to the XML, which Resolve and Premiere import as real, editable captions. The export message says what went out and what was left out. Colour grades and fades stay in Kitlig: the XML format has no portable way to carry them, so grade and fade in the other app, or export media. A clip's Transform goes across as a Basic Motion effect (scale, rotation, position), the sequence frame sets the XML's sequence size, and markers come along as sequence markers.

Package

Export ▾ Package as Directory… and Package as Zip… bundle the FCP XML together with a copy of every media file the timeline references. A bare XML export points at absolute paths on your machine, which becomes a relinking problem the moment you hand it off. Package fixes that by carrying the media along. You pick the destination first; the copy runs as a job, since real footage can take a while.