Getting to grips with the multi-track timeline

Every video editor lives or dies by its timeline. It's where you spend almost all your time, and if it fights you, nothing else about the app matters much. The timeline in Video by Zaweba is deliberately plain. It does the everyday jobs well, and it doesn't hide them behind a forest of panels.

You bring in clips, music and pictures, lay them on tracks, and start cutting. Video, audio and stills can each sit on their own tracks, so a holiday film might have the footage on one, a still photo or two above it, background music below and a voiceover on another. What you see in the preview is exactly what you'll get when you export, which saves a lot of second guessing.

The cuts you'll use every day

Trimming is the first thing to learn. Drag the start or end of a clip to shorten it, and you've taken off the shaky bit at the beginning or the moment someone walked into shot. Splitting cuts a clip in two at the playhead, which is how you remove something from the middle: split either side of it, then get rid of the piece you don't want.

That's where ripple delete comes in. A normal delete leaves a gap where the clip was. Ripple delete closes the gap by pulling everything after it along, so your edit stays tight and you don't end up with a stretch of black. If you've ever spent ten minutes dragging a dozen clips left to fill a hole, you'll appreciate this one.

Link and unlink

When a clip comes in with sound, the picture and the audio are linked, so trimming one trims the other and they stay in sync. Most of the time that's what you want. Sometimes, though, you'd like the sound to carry on a moment after the picture has cut away, or to start a beat early. Unlink them, adjust each part separately, and link them back up when you're done. It's a small trick that makes edits feel much smoother.

Freeze frames and markers

A freeze frame holds a single moment of a clip on screen. It's a nice way to end a video, or to pause on a face while a title appears. Families making a holiday video tend to love this, because there's always one frame of the trip that deserves to sit still for a few seconds.

Markers are less exciting and more useful. Drop one on the timeline wherever you want to remember something: the beat where the music changes, a moment you need to come back to, the spot where a title should go. On a longer project they become a map, and you'll find your way round much faster.

Undo that covers everything

Undo in Video by Zaweba covers every edit. Trim, split, delete, move, it's all undoable. That sounds like it should be standard, but it isn't always, and knowing you can step back from anything makes you braver. Try a ripple delete you're not sure about. If it was a mistake, undo it and try something else.

Alongside undo, your project is saved every minute in the background, and if anything goes wrong it's offered back to you the next time you open the app. Between the two, it's hard to lose work.

Smooth on modest machines

One worry people have about video editing is whether their laptop can cope. Video edits from small proxy copies it makes in the background, so scrubbing and playback stay smooth even when the original files are large. Your originals are only ever read, never changed, and the full quality files are used when you export.

It opens most of what a phone, camera or download will throw at it, including MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MTS, MPG and 3GP, along with common audio formats and pictures such as PNG, JPEG and WebP.

Once you're comfortable trimming, splitting and rippling on the timeline, the rest of the app follows naturally: titles, transitions, sound that balances itself and captions made from speech. But the timeline is home, and it's worth spending your first project just getting to know it.