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Getting started

The whole editor, written down

bentocut is a video editor that runs in a browser tab. The timeline is multitrack, the 172 effects and transitions run on your graphics card, everything keyframes, and it exports up to 8K with nothing burned into the picture. Your footage never leaves your machine.

Start here

Six steps between an empty tab and a finished file. If you have used an editor before, the only one worth reading is the third.

  1. 01

    Open the editor and make a project

    Nothing to install and no account. The dialog asks for a name, an aspect ratio and a frame rate — all three stay changeable afterwards, so pick the obvious answer and move on.

  2. 02

    Drag your footage onto the page

    Or press the button in the Media pane. The files are read where they sit and kept in this browser; nothing is uploaded, so there is no import bar and no queue to wait on.

  3. 03

    Drag a clip from the rack onto a track

    A video with sound arrives as a linked pair — picture on a video track, sound on the audio track under it — and the two move, trim and split together from then on.

  4. 04

    Cut it

    Park the playhead and press ⌘K to split, or take the Cut tool with C and click. Delete leaves the hole; Shift + Delete closes it. Every edit is one step of an undo history with no depth limit.

  5. 05

    Add an effect, or a transition

    Select a clip and press ⌘E. The palette shows each effect running on the frame you are looking at rather than a name in a list, which is the only honest way to choose between slide, push and whip.

  6. 06

    Export

    The button in the header. Pick a container and a resolution, and the render decodes, composites and encodes one frame at a time — no watermark, no length cap, and no card.

How a frame is built

Almost every surprise in an editor is a question about order. Why does a blur ignore the rotation you put on the clip? Why does a slide transition leave the screen instead of sliding out of the layer's box? Why does a track matte cut a group of tracks rather than one clip? All three are answered by the same five stages, and they run in this order for the preview and for the export alike.

A clip is decoded or drawn, its effect rack runs over it at the source's own resolution, the transform places it on the project canvas, the tracks composite bottom-up, and a transition — which is a function of two finished frames rather than one — runs last.

The five panes

The editor is a workspace of panes rather than a fixed screen. Five ship, and any of them can be split, tabbed, floated, closed, or pushed onto a second monitor in a window of its own.

The arrangement a new project opens in. Every pane header carries the control that detaches it, and the whole layout is remembered per project — and separately, by name, as a layout you can reuse anywhere.
Preview
The project canvas. Also where you frame, scale, rotate, crop, draw shapes and drag an effect's on-screen handles.
Media
Everything imported into this project, with a filmstrip for picture and a waveform for sound. Drag from here onto a track.
Inspector
The effect rack for whatever is selected, and the transitions catalogue on a tab beside it.
Timeline
Tracks, clips, the tool rack and the transport. Tracks twirl open into one lane per animated property.
Curves
The curve editor: one property's animation plotted over the clip's own duration, with the easing between keys editable by hand.

Where your work lives

Every project is stored in this browser, on this machine — the document in one IndexedDB store and the imported media in another. There is no server copy, which is the point and also the constraint: clearing the browser's storage for this site takes your projects with it, and a project made on one machine is not on another.

The projects explorer, which is what the editor opens on. Each card draws the project's own canvas shape with its clips where they actually sit, so two projects are told apart by the edit rather than by the name.
  • Projects save themselves as you work — there is no save button and nothing to lose by closing the tab.
  • The editor keeps working with no network. The one thing that reaches out is a Google font the first time you use it, and its bytes are kept locally afterwards.
  • Browsers evict storage under pressure. Installing the editor as an app, or granting persistent storage when asked, is what stops that.

What it will not do

Stated here rather than found later. None of these is a paywall — every feature in this manual is free, and the only thing money buys is removing the ads.

Desktop browsers
There is a single-column shell for a touch screen, and it is a way to review and make small changes rather than a way to cut. Memory and codec limits on phones are real.
Chrome and Edge get everything
Firefox and Safari run the editor but cannot ask you where to save a file, so exports land in Downloads. Safari is the long pole on codec support.
The tab stays open
The render runs in the page. Close the tab mid-export and the export goes with it.
Some files will not open
Decoding is the browser's, so a codec your browser cannot decode is a codec the editor cannot open. It says so rather than failing quietly.
No 3D, and no expressions
The compositor is 2D. Layers move, scale, rotate and shear on a flat canvas; there is no camera and no scripting language on a property.
No AI background removal
Keying measures colour, so it needs an actual screen behind the subject. There are nine keyers and four matte tools for that, and nothing for a kitchen.

The rest of the manual

Nine pages, in the order it is worth meeting them. 76 filters, 88 entrances and exits and 8 sound effects are catalogued across them.