The History tab and undo in Video by Zaweba
The History tab in Video by Zaweba lists up to 300 undoable steps you can jump between, merges slider drags into one step and takes back edits that fail.
Mistakes and changes of mind are part of every edit. Undo is the tool for both, and Video by Zaweba takes it further than a single step back. The History tab shows your session's edits as a list you can move through, and the way steps are recorded is designed to keep that list useful rather than cluttered.
What the History tab shows
Open the History tab and you see every undoable step of the session, up to 300 of them. Below the current point are any steps that can be redone, the ones you have undone but not yet replaced with something new.
Click any step in the list and the project goes straight to that point. There is no need to press undo forty times to get back to how the edit looked before you started rearranging the second half. Find the step, click it, and look. If it was better before, carry on from there. If not, click the latest step to come back.
That makes History a way to compare as much as a way to recover. You can flick between two states of an edit and judge which one works.
Steps that make sense
An undo list is only useful if each step means something. Drag a slider for opacity, scale or colour and the app could record a step for every tiny movement, leaving hundreds of entries for one adjustment. Video by Zaweba merges a slider drag into one step, so a single undo takes the whole adjustment back.
Trims work the same way. Each trim is one step, and a dynamic trim in the trim monitor is committed as one step when you press K. Lift, extract, insert and overwrite are each a single step too.
When an edit fails
Occasionally an edit cannot finish. Something in the middle of a complex change might not be possible, for example. Rather than leaving the project half changed, Video by Zaweba takes the edit back so the project is as it was before. The Events tab says what happened, so you are not left wondering why nothing changed.
This matters more than it sounds. A half finished edit is the kind of problem that shows up much later as a clip that is slightly out of sync or an effect that has gone missing. Taking failed edits back keeps the project consistent.
How it fits with saving
History covers the current session. It is there for going back over the work you have done since opening the project. It is not a substitute for saving or for keeping copies of a project at important stages. For bigger safety nets, Video by Zaweba also has autosave and crash recovery, which are covered elsewhere.
A good habit before a risky change, such as rebuilding a whole section, is to duplicate the timeline. With several timelines in one project, the original stays exactly as it was, and you can compare the two at leisure. History handles the small reversals and duplicated timelines handle the big experiments.
Using it well
Try changes freely. Knowing you can go back makes it easier to test an idea, like a different order of shots or a bolder grade, instead of talking yourself out of it.
Use the list rather than repeated undo when you need to go back a long way. It is quicker, and you can see the names of the steps, which helps you find the right point.
Be aware that if you go back several steps and then make a new edit, the steps that could have been redone are replaced by your new one. If you think you might want them, look at them first, or make your experiment on a duplicate timeline.
A quiet safety net
Most of the time you will barely notice History. It sits there recording, and you reach for it when something goes wrong or when you want to compare. That is the point. In Video by Zaweba it is designed to stay out of the way until the moment you need it.
