The Timeline Editor: Turning Clips Into an Actual Video

Generating video gives you clips. Five seconds here, eight seconds there, in whatever order you happened to make them.

The timeline editor is where they become one thing. It's the least glamorous part of the platform and the one that turns a folder of experiments into something you can actually post.

---

Finding it

Studio in the left sidebar. What you land on is a list of your timelines: every project you've started, plus a New Timeline tile.

Each timeline is saved and reopenable. You don't have to finish in one sitting, and you can keep several versions of an edit as separate timelines.

---

The tracks

A timeline is stacked rows, all sharing one clock running left to right.

Video track. Your clips, in order. Drag to reorder, drag an edge to trim. This is where most of the work happens.

Music track. A soundtrack running under the whole thing, independent of the clips. Generate something in the music generator or bring in your own.

Overlay track. Anything sitting on top of the picture: a logo, a title card, a graphic. Overlays have their own timing, so a logo can appear for the last two seconds only.

Narration. Voice over the top, if you've made some with text to speech.

The point of separate tracks is that everything stays independent. Reordering clips doesn't move the music. Swapping one clip doesn't disturb the logo.

---

Transitions

Between any two clips you can set a transition, and there are sixteen of them: fade, dissolve, slide, push, wipe, zoom, crosszoom, iris, flip, rotate, cube, blur, bounce, glitch, flash and swirl.

Some honest advice: most of the time, use a hard cut or a short fade.

Cuts are what real editing looks like. Glitch, swirl and cube are strong effects with narrow uses: one, deliberately placed, can be great; one between every pair of clips makes a video look like a 2004 slideshow.

Dissolve is the safe choice when a cut feels too abrupt.

---

Working faster

The keyboard does the obvious things:

• Space, play and pause
• Left / right arrows, step through the timeline
• Delete or Backspace, remove the selected item

Drag and drop handles the rest, including dragging whole track rows to reorder them.

---

Aspect ratio

Set at export: 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1.

Decide before you generate the clips, not after. A timeline of 16:9 clips exported as 9:16 has to crop, and cropping is where subjects lose their heads. If the destination is Reels, generate at 9:16 from the beginning.

---

Exporting

Press export and the video is rendered on the server rather than in your browser, so it takes a moment, and you don't need to keep the tab busy. When it's done you get a preview and a download.

Export costs 5 credits, and that is the only charge in the whole editor. Better still, the system fingerprints the timeline: if you export again without having changed anything, it hands back the existing render rather than charging you for the same video twice.

So if something's wrong, fix the timeline and re-export. Nothing is destroyed by exporting, and re-exporting an unchanged edit is free.

---

The workflow this is built for

1. Plan the shots. Three to six clips is a good target for a short.
2. Generate them consistently, same model, same aspect ratio, same look. Use a shared reference image so they belong together.
3. Assemble in the timeline, in order.
4. Add music, then narration if there is any.
5. Transitions last, sparingly.
6. Export at the aspect ratio the platform wants.

Step 2 is where consistency is won or lost. Clips generated from unrelated prompts will not cut together no matter how good the transitions are, different light, different colour, different world. Deciding the look once and holding it across every clip is most of what makes an edit feel intentional.

Here is the whole sequence as one piece, three separately generated five-second clips, a dissolve into the second and a hard cut into the third:

Nothing was colour-graded to make those cut together. They match because the same three phrases, dark grey slate, deep charcoal background, one hard shaft of late afternoon light from the upper right, were in all three prompts. That is the cheapest continuity trick there is, and it happens before you open the editor.

And it shows you the limit of the trick. Look at the middle shot: that is a different vessel from the one in the first. The prompt described the world accurately enough that the light, the stone and the palette all carried, but describing a product in words will not give you the same product twice. If the object has to be identical across every cut, and for a real client it does: you attach it as a reference image rather than describing it. Words hold a look; only a picture holds a thing.

---

Try it

Take two clips you've already made, open the timeline editor, put them on the video track with a fade between them, add music, and export. Assembling costs nothing; the export is 5 credits.

Then: the video generator · prompt writing for motion