The editor

For a complete production walkthrough without editing experience, see Produire une vidéo complète avec Tramme (français): copyable prompts, visual decisions, sound, correction and final delivery.

Home: the direction box first. Words describe the film (subject, tone, length; ideas to start from under it), material joins them (documents, pictures, footage, sounds, a whole folder, picked or dropped), a format is chosen (16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5), and the project opens in the studio with the assistant already at work: words alone start the assistant on the film, words with material are read first (/analyze), one video is dressed as the words say. Under it, your films with their thumbnails and the examples; a blank project (formats, frame rate), a video (at its size, frame rate and length), a .tramme file or a Lottie animation are under “Other ways in” (or dropped on the page). Each project can be renamed, duplicated, saved to the computer as .tramme, or deleted.
Two views of a project, one switch in the top bar (and in the settings): the studio, where you direct, and the atelier, where you craft. The studio is the default.
Studio: the film in front, directed in words. The direction bar under the picture takes what you want, as you would tell an editor (“the intro drags”, “a bolder title here”); a click on the picture pins the note there (the assistant is told the point and the layer under it), a click on a scene of the storyboard puts it in focus (the notes and the suggestions are about it until the focus goes). Suggestions over the bar change with the moment: ideas for an empty film, the whole film’s (review, rhythm, palette, sound, a 9:16 version), the scene’s (more impact, calmer, another layout, shorter, redo). While the assistant works, the stage it is at shows over the film (reading, directing, building, sound, reviewing) and a light runs around the picture; its result arrives as a take, to compare before and after, keep, set aside, or do again in another direction. The storyboard under the film: the scenes (the composition’s scene markers, or the compositions a film plays) as strips of their own frames with their names, the sound (music and voice drawn, effects as ticks), the notes at their moments, a press to seek and a drag to scrub. Beside the film, the notes, each with its moment, its scene and its pin, the assistant’s work under it (its stages, its steps one click away, the frames it looked at, its take), and the direction it follows: the film’s idea, the brief (about, tone, rules: edited here, it wins over the assistant’s habits), the palette and type, the material. Keys: N writes a note, P pins it, Escape lets go, Space plays.
Atelier: the classic editor, for the detail; the same project, the same conversation.
An imported file is checked before it enters storage: format structure, document, loaded plugins, present assets. An imported project always gets a new id.
Top bar: back to projects, name, autosave (refused if the document changed in another tab), the view, undo and redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z), composition, format, frame rate, export (in the studio, the format, frame rate and length in one menu).
Left: layer tree (drag and drop, rename, hide, precompose), compositions and assets (import by drag and drop, Lottie included), brand tokens.
Packs: general-purpose plugins ship with the editor — charts, kinetic type, physics, stick figures, icons, diagrams, UI walkthrough, accessibility checks, localization, code view, rhythm, screencast, handmade, chat, emoji, maps, math, matter, print, QR codes, logos in 3D — and the Code section of the left panel adds one to the project in a click. Plugins can bring their own translations: Interface languages.
Languages: English and French (settings, Appearance; automatic from the browser). Plugins can bring their own translations: Interface languages.
Guided tours (? button): the home screen and the editor introduce themselves the first time they open; the other tours (the tricks, drawn animation, sound, looks, cutting on tracks, speech, the tools of the / menu, the assistant, making the editor one’s own) wait in the help menu. A plugin or a script can add its own: Guided tours.
Settings (gear, Ctrl+,): dark, light gray or system theme; the pictures a provider makes (provider, quality, size at most); the clips a provider makes (provider, length); preview quality per computer, while playing (automatic from the frame rate reached, full, half, quarter) and when still (displayed size or full resolution), preview motion blur (document, limited, off), playback at the composition’s frames; the assistant’s model and access. Exports always stay at full quality. The preview stays sharp when still, and its final image is computed in slices without freezing the interface.
Viewport: the engine’s preview, zoom (Ctrl+wheel), pan (Space or middle button), safe zones, grid, click to select, move, scale and rotate handles. A path’s vertices drag with their tangents (Shift keeps the two tangents mirrored; Alt+click on the stroke adds a vertex, Delete takes the selected one out), and the anchor cross moves with the layer staying put on screen (Alt moves the anchor alone).
Transport and timeline: playback with sound, editable timecode, layer bars to move or trim, keyframes to drag, markers. The right click opens the timeline’s own menus (never the browser’s): on a clip, split, trim the start or the end or bring it to the playhead, then the layer’s menu; on an empty place or the ruler, the playhead or a marker there, the composition ending there or at its content, a layer, select all, the whole timeline in view; on a marker, go there or delete it; on a keyframe, its curve.
Tracks: a composition can be a sequence, its clips on lanes (locks, magnets, mute, solo), cut with the keys of an editor (Ctrl+B, Q and W, Shift+Delete, insert and overwrite, roll, slip, slide), fed from a media panel with bins, tags, a source monitor and sub-clips, with a mixer, multicam, voice-over recording and a guided publication: Cutting on tracks.
Curves: values over time, Bézier handles per segment, curve presets and tokens, final curve with modifiers.
Inspector generated from the schemas: each property can be fixed, animated, an expression or a link; stackable modifiers and layer effects.
Drawn animation: the “Image sequence” layer plays drawings frame by frame, held “on twos” or driven by an exposure sheet (1-4/2, 5/6, 4-1/2, x/3), looping, once or ping-pong; a drawing can be forced with hold keyframes (a mouth). Numbered drawings imported together (eye_01.png, eye_02.png…) go in their own folder; right click, “Animate the folder”, turns them into a sequence. Motion blur never mixes two drawings.
Video: the “Video” layer plays an MP4, WebM or MOV file frame by frame (WebCodecs, range requests, never loaded whole), at the exact frame on export; its sound goes into the preview and the exports. Each layer can start further into the file (start): an edit is a series of layers. Files larger than 95 MB are uploaded in parts (4 GiB at most).
Sound: “Sound” layers with volume (animatable: fades, ducking), fades, low and high cut, a three-band equaliser (low shelf, mid bell with its frequency, high shelf), reverb and speed, mixed by one mixer in the preview, the exports and the command line. A library of 421 recorded sounds (Kenney, CC0) and sounds written as code ships with the editor; your own sounds go into a library shared by the projects.
Speech: nothing is transcribed on its own. The Transcribe button (on a file joined to a message, on the material of the film, in the assets, in the “Speech” section of the inspector of a sound or video layer, in their menus) makes the transcript (words and times), a JSON asset; when the assistant needs one that is missing, it asks first. The “Captions” layer shows it a few words at a time, the spoken word highlighted (color, pill or scale).
Event lists: a story that keeps score (money spent, laughs, points) writes its events once (/events: 3.1 Petrol cash -18 | full tank). Counters in a corner roll at each change (/event-counter), a tag pops up at each event (/event-tags), a receipt lists them all at the end (/event-receipt), and expressions read the running totals with events(). They all read the list: change it and they follow.
Tracked callouts: draw a rectangle over something filmed (or name it: a car, a person), /track follows it through the shot and /callout puts brackets and a label on it that stay on it; expressions read where it is with track().
Export in the browser, with the preview’s engine: MP4 (H.264), WebM (VP9 with alpha), GIF, PNG sequence (zip), Lottie, SVG of the current frame, WAV. The file is saved to the computer or kept in the project’s renders/.
Responsive and touch: under 760 px, the studio puts the film, then the storyboard, then the notes one under the other, the direction bar at the thumb; the atelier’s panels become tabs under the picture; the header gathers composition, format, frame rate, view, help and settings in a “⋯” menu; the home screen goes to one column. With a finger, pinch to zoom, two fingers move the view, one finger on the background too. The editor can be installed on a phone’s home screen (web manifest).