## Devlog: Building a Full-Featured Mobile Video Editor in React 🎬 (Record, Reorder & Transitions)
Mobile video editing usually comes with a massive compromise: you either build a lightweight client that pushes heavy rendering to a cloud server, or you fight hardware constraints to keep everything local. With AetherCut, we chose the hard way. We refuse cloud uploads. Instead, we leverage advanced web APIs to execute everything on-device. We are excited to launch our massive Mobile Editor…
AetherCut has launched a major upgrade to its mobile video editor. This client-side solution eschews cloud uploads in favor of processing everything natively on the device. Key enhancements include native camera recording, precise on-device clip trimming and reordering, and customizable frame-by-frame transitions.
The editor allows users to record clips directly within the app using either the front or rear camera. Once recorded, clips can be trimmed with a dual-handle slider UI, enabling quick isolation of perfect frames.
To assemble a reel, users can drag and drop clips on the timeline. The app uses a visual anchor for each clip, displaying a thumbnail of the first frame for easy recognition. Clips can be reordered by long-press dragging or using precision arrow keys. An undo feature lets users revert the last timeline shift with a single tap.
For video transitions, users now have granular control over each boundary between clips. Options include hard cuts, crossfades, slides, and wipes. Directional control allows specifying the movement vector for slide and wipe transitions, while precise timing controls the pacing of each transition. The app also remembers users' favorite transition styles and suggests them for future use.
AetherCut emphasizes privacy and speed, ensuring raw footage never leaves the device. This results in zero bandwidth usage and instant rendering. The update includes an interactive onboarding tour to guide users through the new layout and an embedded one-tap bug-report feature for capturing edge cases.
Under the hood, the app leverages React's component state along with optimized APIs like WebCodecs and MediaRecorder to offload video processing to the device's GPU. This eliminates significant lag associated with cloud-based editors. Users can open their browser DevTools while editing to confirm that no outbound video data is transmitted. The new build is available for download on Google Play.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
