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Playback & performance

The editor decodes and composites your media live in the browser, so preview performance depends on your machine, your browser, and your footage. The good news first: preview performance never affects your output. Exports render frame by frame, so a preview that stutters still exports perfectly.

First, the quick reset​

Most playback oddities — stale thumbnails, missing waveforms, a preview that got slower over a long session — clear with two steps:

  1. Settings → Storage → Clear cache. This empties the preview, waveform, and thumbnail caches. The editor rebuilds them on demand, so the first scrub afterwards is slower while filmstrips regenerate.
  2. Reload the tab. Long editing sessions accumulate memory; a reload gives the browser a fresh start. Your project is autosaved, so nothing is lost.

Choppy or laggy preview​

If playback still stutters after the reset:

  • Use a modern Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Arc, Brave). The editor leans on fast video decode and cross-origin-isolated features that are most mature there.
  • Check hardware acceleration is on in your browser's settings — software decode struggles with high-resolution video.
  • Mind the codec and resolution. Several 4K clips, high-bitrate HEVC, or 10-bit footage is heavy for any browser. If your source is very heavy, import a lower-resolution version to edit with — your trims and timing carry over if you swap the file later, and generation results from Studio are already browser-friendly.
  • Close other heavy tabs. The editor shares your machine with everything else Chrome is doing.

Thumbnails or waveforms won't appear​

Filmstrips and waveforms are computed per-clip and cached. If some clips show blank strips:

  • Clear the cache (Settings → Storage) and scrub through the clip to force a rebuild.
  • If only externally imported files misbehave, re-import them via ⌘I so the media is staged fresh. See Importing media.

Media search is slow or missing results​

Semantic media search (finding clips by what's in them, or by what was said) uses an on-device index. It's controlled in Settings → Storage → Media search with the "Runs on-device" toggle:

  • If search misses recent imports, the index simply hasn't caught up — it builds in the background in that browser.
  • Toggling it off and on starts fresh indexing, which fixes a corrupted or stale index.
  • The index lives per-browser, so a new machine starts empty.

When it's none of the above​

If the editor is slow on a strong machine with light footage, something is genuinely wrong — tell us. Include your browser and OS, the footage's resolution and codec if you know them, and whether the quick reset helped. Help → Send Feedback… inside the editor sends the report with useful context attached.