Projects & the editor
A project is one timeline plus its media, transcript, captions, and chat history. You create one with the wizard on the home screen and edit it in the editor described below.
The Create project wizard
Click Create project on the home screen. The path depends on the editing mode you pick in step 2.
1 · Choose format
Vertical short (portrait, for social feeds) or Landscape long form (for YouTube and courses). The format steers which editing style presets and caption defaults the wizard offers.
2 · Choose editing mode
- Step-by-step AI editing: the wizard ends here. Agent28 creates a project named “New project”, opens the editor, and puts the chat in Plan mode. Import your media from the Media tab and ask for edits one at a time.
- Autonomous editing (Beta): the wizard continues with the steps below and then runs the whole pipeline once the editor opens.
3 · What kind of video is this?
| Type | Meant for | Extra step |
|---|---|---|
| Talking head | One speaker to camera: interviews, opinions, explainers. | None |
| Vlog | First-person footage across locations. The only type that accepts several clips. | Optional background music (MP3, WAV, M4A) |
| Follow the beat | Cuts locked to a music track. | A music track is required; the wizard will not continue without one |
4 · Upload your video
Drop a file or click to browse. MP4, MOV, and WebM are accepted. Vlog projects take multiple clips; the other types take one.
5 · Choose AI features
All four are off until you turn them on:
- Auto Captions — transcribe and add animated captions.
- Cut Silences — the gear opens the cut settings: Cut silences, Remove retakes, Remove filler words, Remove off-topic speech (all on by default) and Cut aggressiveness: Light (keeps more natural pauses), Normal (the default), or Aggressive (maximum concision).
- Stock B-roll — cover visual gaps with Pixabay and Pexels footage, trimmed to fit.
- Motion Graphics — AI-placed animations based on the transcript. Adds a brief step at the end.
6 · Editing style, caption style, brief
- Editing style: presets for landscape are Alex Hormozi, Simple, Iman Gadzhi; for vertical, Alex Hormozi, Devin, Simple. Styles you saved from Style Studio appear underneath. Choosing a preset also sets the caption template, palette, and font pair unless you changed those yourself.
- Caption style: shown for landscape projects with Auto Captions on. Templates marked Plus need a paid plan.
- Motion graphics brief: a sentence or two about the video and the graphics you want, e.g. “This is a product review for wireless headphones. Add money and trophy animations during the highlights.”
A palette and font-pair picker sits in the wizard's bottom bar on every step; it feeds the caption and motion-graphics defaults.
What Autonomous editing runs
After the editor opens, the pipeline runs in the chat panel and reports each stage as a message. In order:
- Add your video (and the music track, if any) to the timeline.
- Captions, if selected: extract audio, transcribe with the engine set in the Captions tab, insert captions.
- Cut Silences, if selected: the cut agent removes what the cut settings allow (“Cutting silences and cleaning up speech…”).
- Follow the beat only: snap the cuts to the music's beat grid.
- Auto zooms, if Auto zoom is on in the Zoom tab.
- Stock B-roll, if selected: the b-roll agent finds cover shots and inserts them.
- Motion Graphics, if selected, from your brief.
- Caption styling from the chosen template.
Each stage is an ordinary chat turn. Anything you dislike can be reverted from that turn's Revert button while the rest stays.
The editor
| Area | What is there |
|---|---|
| Left rail | Media, Captions, Motion Graphics, Sounds, Text, Stickers, Effects, Transitions, Zoom, Depth, Settings. Media is selected when a project opens. |
| Center | Preview above, timeline below. All panels are resizable; the properties panel collapses. |
| Right | The chat panel (“28”) by default. Selecting an element replaces it with that element's properties; the Chat button in the header brings the chat back. |
| Properties tabs | Depend on the element: Transform, Blending, Audio, Speed, Masks, Track, Effects, Text, Graphic, AI, Selection, Camera, Look, Contents. |
- Zoom tab: the Auto zoom switch punches in at sentence starts and eases back out. Choose how often (Frequent, Medium, Only at emphasising points) and click Re-apply zooms after re-cutting. The zooms are normal keyframes on the timeline and stay editable.
- Transitionstab: Fade, Zoom, Spin, Whip Pan, Slide Left / Right / Up / Down, Paper Wipe, Cutout Pop, Light Leak Blue, Light Leak Orange. A transition's settings include a SFX picker (swoosh or shutter sounds) and Duration.
- Effects tab: Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Editorial Texture, Halftone, Light Leak, Film Grain, Vignette, Filmed Screen, Wide Lens, Scanline, Zoom Blur.
- Depth tab: right-click a clip and choose Cinematic depth… to separate the person from the background so captions and graphics can sit behind them. Matte quality is Fast or High accuracy; the model (about 25 MB) downloads on first run.
- Masks tab: Rectangle, Ellipse, Diamond, Star, Heart, Split, Text, Person, Tracked region, Cinematic Bars, or freeform.
- Blending tab: 17 blend modes from Normal to Luminosity.
- A banner reading “GPU acceleration isn't available” means the preview is running on software rendering; the editor still works, but preview and export are slower.
Importing media
- The Media tab accepts image, video, and audio files through the file picker, drag and drop, and paste. Sort by Name, Type, Duration, or File size; switch between grid and list.
- Every imported video is queued for scene indexing in the background, and is transcribed at import when the transcription engine is a local one. Cloud transcription never runs on import, so it cannot spend your OpenAI key without you asking.
- Right-click an asset for Mark as brand asset, background removal, and copy frame. Brand assets can be searched separately by the agent.
Sounds, stickers, stock
- Sounds tab: sound-effect search backed by Freesound, plus a Saved tab. Music search is available through the agent, not this tab; project music otherwise comes from the wizard upload.
- Stickers tab: All, Flags, Shapes, Annotations.
- Stock footage (Pexels and Pixabay) is fetched by the agent when you ask for b-roll; Agent28 supplies the API keys. Licensed web footage (Creative Commons YouTube, Internet Archive, Openverse) is only ever suggested as cards, and each import waits for your confirmation.
Searching your footage
After a video is indexed, the agent can find moments in it by meaning: “find the shot where I hold up the phone”. Indexing runs in the local AI sidecar and shows stages such as Detecting scenes, Extracting keyframes, and Indexing scenes. On macOS the sidecar needs macOS 13 or later; if it is unavailable, footage search returns nothing and the rest of the app is unaffected. The index is written to the app data folder under index/<project>.
Where projects live
Projects, media, and transcripts are stored locally in the app's own browser-style databases inside its data folder. There is no project file to open or move, and nothing is uploaded when you save. Autosave fires less than a second after each change and waits until playback stops.
Note: Because storage is local, a project does not follow you to another computer. Export the finished video, or keep the footage and re-import.
Project settings
Open Settings from the left rail. The Project group has three tabs:
- Project Info: rename the project and see its format.
- Canvas & Video: resolution and frame rate, shown read-only.
- AI Features: the editing style preset, and the Video Type (Talking head, Vlog, Follow the beat). If it is not set, the agent asks before its first story build.