What changed, and when.

Your work stays on screen, even when your session runs out.

If your sign-in expired while you were editing, CNEX-Cut used to send you back to the sign-in screen — and the project you had open went with it. Signing back in brought that project up empty, and the empty version was then saved over your work. This was the worst thing the app could do, and it is fixed. A session running out now puts a sign-in box over the editor instead of replacing it: your timeline stays exactly where it was, everything you had done is still there, and signing in puts you straight back into the same workspace and carries on saving. If you would rather leave instead, signing out from that box does the ordinary thing.

The recorder no longer shrinks itself the moment you start recording your screen. It used to hide the sound meter, the name of what you were recording and the elapsed time at the exact moment those became worth watching, with no way back until you pressed stop. The panel now stays until you ask it to get out of the way, and the small bar it becomes has a button to bring it back.

Sound could stop working until you quit and reopened the app. Under heavy load the part that handles audio can quietly die, and once it had, nothing played sound again — not in that project, and not in any project you opened afterwards. The app now notices within a second and rebuilds it, so the sound comes back on its own.

Pressing play starts the picture and the sound together. On a busy machine the video used to start first and the sound caught up a moment later, then jumped to get back in step. Play now waits for everything under the playhead to be ready, tells you it is waiting, and starts them on the same frame.

Also in this release: a screen recording made with both sound sources turned off arrives as a genuinely silent clip, instead of carrying a soundtrack it never had; and a recording that could not be uploaded because your session had run out now uploads itself the moment you sign back in, rather than waiting for you to ask.

Detach audio now means it.

One click on Detach audio is now the whole separation: the sound lands on its own clip on the audio lane, at exactly the same instant as the picture — play right away and they are still in step — and from that moment the two are fully independent clips. Move the video and the audio stays; move the audio and the video stays. The picture goes quiet, stops drawing its waveform, and will not take a merged sound back unless you undo.

Before this, the first detach made a linked pair that still travelled together, and unlinking that pair dressed the picture up as if the sound were still inside it. Both of those are gone — one detach detaches.

The timeline learns to hold your story together, footage arrives whole, and a new blade cuts exactly where you point.

The magnet button above the timeline finally means something. With snapping on — the default for new projects — the main track keeps its clips flowing from the start with nothing between them: trim a shot and everything after it closes up on its own, delete one and the hole closes behind it, drag one along the track and you are reordering the story rather than parking rectangles. Before this, trimming the third clip of ten left a hole that had to be closed by hand, ten clips nudged one at a time. Turning snapping on over a timeline that has gaps asks first, and one undo takes the whole decision back. Prefer the old freedom? Turn it off and everything stays exactly where you put it.

Video arrives as one clip now. It used to land as two pieces — the picture on one layer, its sound on another — and a cut aimed at one of them took only that one, which is how clips that looked attached came apart in people's hands. Now the picture strip and its waveform sit together in a single block that cuts, moves and copies as one thing, with the sound controls right there in the inspector. Splitting them is still one click away when you mean it: detach the audio and it lands right underneath, perfectly in step — and from that moment picture and sound are fully independent clips, each moving on its own, until an undo rejoins them.

There is a new way to cut. Select a clip and a small toolset appears over the timeline — arrow, scissors, delete, copy, duplicate. Pick the scissors and a red line rides your pointer across whichever clip you are over, with the preview showing the exact frame under the line; click, and that clip splits right there, no matter where the playhead is parked. Click any empty patch of timeline, press Escape, or pick the arrow to put the blade away. The S key still splits at the playhead, exactly as before.

Your project also knows which copy of itself is the real one now. Every save carries a fingerprint, so the app can tell "this device has work the cloud never received" from "someone edited this on another machine" — and only asks when there is genuinely something to decide. Opening a project that is already open on another device says so, and offers to take over; the other device is told the moment it happens. If both copies changed, the two versions open side by side, read-only, so you can play them and pick — or keep both as separate projects that share their footage.

Also in this release: dropping a clip between two others slides the neighbours aside instead of throwing them onto a new layer, in both snapping modes; closing the window finishes your last save with a way to leave without waiting; and copy and duplicate join the timeline's toolset.

The filmstrip now carries its soundtrack.

When you ask an assistant to check a cut, the contact sheet it looks at now has the timeline's sound drawn underneath the frames: the whole mix as one waveform, with every cut, every beat and every sampled frame marked on it. Before, the sheet could show when the picture changed and nothing about the sound it was supposed to change with — a shot landing a beat late, or music running out under the last scene, was invisible until somebody watched the export.

An assistant's cloud export now goes through the same paid render queue you use from the export panel. It used to take an older path that rendered inside the server and charged nobody; now the credits are reserved before the render starts, settled for what it actually cost, and the answer says so. There is a fast tier for a deadline, and every extra shape the project builds for comes back as its own file.

Also in this release: the assistant's instructions spell out what a finished video has to be — no gaps, no soft footage, sound mixed rather than stacked, cuts on the beat — and the filmstrip is the acceptance test before anything is exported; and the About panel shows the real package version.

Two things that only ever looked wrong on Windows.

Windows draws the minimise, maximise and close buttons itself, over the top of the app, and it paints the ground behind them — the app has to tell it what colour to use. We were telling it one of two flat shades picked to match the editor's header, which meant those buttons looked right in the editor and wrong everywhere else. On the projects and sign-in screens, which are gradients, they sat in a pale rectangle stamped over the colour, like a sticker somebody forgot to peel off. Dark mode had the same seam in reverse.

No single colour could have been right, because the app behind those buttons is not one colour. So there is no colour there any more: the ground is transparent and whatever the app is drawing simply carries on underneath, gradients included. Only the little symbols are still told which way to go, since Windows draws those too and they would vanish against half the app.

The other fix is smaller and sillier. The notice that appears when a machine is short of memory or cores was cutting its own heading in half — "This device is below the recommended m…" and then nothing, no dots to admit a word was missing. It fitted on macOS and did not on Windows, whose system font is a little wider, which is the kind of difference you only find on somebody else's computer. The heading now wraps.

Everything else in this release is identical to 2.5.2.

Windows now knows who made CNEX Cut.

Until today Windows had no idea who wrote this software. Downloading it said "Publisher: Unknown", and running it threw a full-screen blue "Windows protected your PC", with the real button hidden behind "More info". That is what Windows shows for software it cannot identify, and it could not identify ours: our installers had never been signed. Nothing was wrong with them, but nothing proved that either, and being asked to override a security warning is a poor way to meet a new application.

The Windows installer is now signed by CONNEKZ LIMITED. Windows reads that signature and names us — the download prompt says "Publisher: NZ, Auckland, CONNEKZ LIMITED" where it used to say "Unknown", and the permission prompt when you install shows a verified publisher instead of a warning. It also means Windows will tell you if anyone ever tampers with a copy of CNEX Cut, because the signature covers every byte of it.

One honest caveat: for a while yet, Windows may still say the file "isn't commonly downloaded". That is a separate check — SmartScreen counting how many people have fetched this particular file — and it has nothing to do with the signature. It settles as each release gets installed, and it should fade faster from here, because every release now arrives carrying the same verified identity instead of anonymous.

If you are on macOS or Linux, this release is identical to 2.5.1 and there is nothing here for you — macOS builds have been signed and notarised by Apple all along.

The music tab is one list now, and pressing play tells you it heard you.

The music library had started talking about itself. The search box quoted how many tracks it could reach, a line above the pagination totalled up whatever your search had matched, and every track wore the name of the catalogue it had come from — with a row of catalogue names across the top to filter by. None of that was a number or a name anybody was going to act on. It just turned one library into an argument about where the music lived. So it is gone, and what is left is a search box, the moods, and the tracks. Each row says who made it and how long it runs. Where a track is licensed in a way that asks your finished video to credit it, that credit still shows, because that one is owed to the track rather than to us.

The other thing was the play button. A track is a download before it is a sound — a couple of megabytes have to arrive before anything can come out of your speakers — and for the whole of that wait the button sat there looking exactly as it had before you touched it. So the click read as ignored, and got made again, and again, and then all of them arrived at once. Now the button takes the press: a green ring turns on its edge while the track is on its way, and it stops accepting clicks until it has something to give you. The pause icon waits for the sound to actually start, so when you see it, the music is playing.

Also in this release: a preview that cannot start — a track that stalls, or a browser that will not play audio — now says so and gives you the button back, instead of leaving it spinning; and a track that plays to its end returns to a play icon rather than offering to pause silence.

Effects you can put where you want them, and music from beyond our own library.

An effect used to be something a clip either had or didn't: a fade in, a fade out, a look applied to the whole thing. Now an effect is a span you place — it starts where you want, runs as long as you want, and eases the way you want, including a curve you draw yourself. One "Fade" carries a direction instead of being two different effects; one "Slide" carries a side. Every effect comes with a plain description of what it does and which layers suit it, and the search finds what you meant rather than what you typed.

Ten of them move — drifts, sweeps, pulses — and cloud exports render those the same way the stage shows them.

The music library is no longer only ours. Searching it now reaches Openverse, ccMixter and Freesound alongside the CNEX library, all in one list, and keeps going past the first page for catalogues far bigger than we could show at once. Everything stays properly licensed, with attribution where the licence asks for it. If one source is having a bad day it drops out of the results quietly rather than turning into an error you have to read.

Also in this release: renders live in a tray you can page through and dismiss once you have your file; the done screen opens the file straight into your library; the projects screen can move several projects into a folder at once; and on the Mac the window buttons sit in the app's own top row.

The window is yours to the very top, and your renders wait for you.

On the Mac the window buttons now sit in the app's own top row, the way a browser does it, instead of on a separate bar between the menu bar and the app. In full screen, moving to the top shows the menu bar and nothing else.

Renders live in a tray at the bottom of the window: every export still running, and every one that has finished and you have not collected yet, with a count and arrows to page through them. Open one to see its progress or download it; a finished one has a dismiss button, and stays until you use it, whichever device you are on. The done screen can now open the file straight into your library.

On the projects screen you can move several projects into a folder at once, from the right-click menu or from the bar that appears when more than one is selected, alongside delete. Drag a box around them, or shift with the arrow keys, to pick them.

Also in this release: closing the app with a project open no longer tells you the app crashed; the export progress bar now moves at a steady rate rather than jumping between stages; cloud rendering of title-heavy and 4K projects is a great deal faster and no longer stalls; and keyframed zooms on footage layers animate correctly in cloud exports.

Your render keeps showing until you have your file.

A render you started now stays on screen as the small progress pill until you have opened it and closed the export panel, whatever else you do in between. Switch to another project, reload, quit and come back tomorrow: the pill is still there, named after the render rather than whatever you happen to have open, and opening it gives you the file. A render on this device carries on in the background exactly as it always did; what changed is that the window no longer forgets about it.

The same is true of a cloud render, and there it follows you across devices: start a long export on the desktop app and the pill is waiting in the web editor too, right up until you collect it.

Also in this release: cloud rendering is a great deal faster and no longer stalls on title-heavy or 4K projects, keyframed zooms on footage layers now animate in cloud exports (they had been rendering frozen at their first frame), and the credit estimate is based on how long the render will actually take rather than how many title states it has.

Connecting CNEX-Cut to Claude works again.

If you had connected the editor to Claude Desktop, Claude may have reported the connection as disconnected and refused to use it. The app was handing Claude the wrong location for the small helper that carries messages between the two — a location that did not exist on your machine. Because that helper never started, there was nothing left to explain itself, and all Claude could report was that the server had disconnected.

This release points at the right place, and checks the file is really there before writing anything into Claude's settings. If your connection was already broken by this, simply opening CNEX-Cut repairs it: the app notices a connection whose helper has gone missing and quietly puts it right. A connection you set up yourself, pointing somewhere deliberate, is left exactly as it is.

The helper is steadier too. A single unexpected message used to take the whole connection down with it. A request that arrived while the editor was restarting was told the app was closed, rather than waiting a moment and asking again. A reply still on its way when a conversation ended was dropped. None of that happens any more.

Also in this release: when Claude duplicates a project for you, the copy now turns up in your project list. It was being filed just outside the library, so it opened perfectly well if you still had it open and vanished if you did not — which meant the copy you took to protect your work before a big change was the one thing you could not find afterwards. And the fonts used for animated text are now located the same reliable way as the connector, so a future build cannot quietly start drawing text in the wrong typeface.

Fading a shot on the main video track now works.

The opacity control only ever did anything on layers stacked above your main video. On the main track itself it dimmed the preview and was then ignored when the video was actually made, so a shot you had faded came out at full strength in the finished file — and there was no way to find that out until the render had finished.

There was a second half to it. The main track could not fade between shots at all, so the only way to build a cut where one shot dips away and the next comes up was to move every clip onto layers stacked above an empty main track. That works, but it is not what a timeline is meant to look like, and it makes a simple edit harder to follow than it needs to be.

Both are fixed. Opacity now means the same thing everywhere: on the main track it fades toward black, which is the only thing it can mean when there is nothing underneath it. And it reads the same in the preview, in a video made on your own machine, and in one made in the cloud — those three had quietly disagreed.

Rendering now sizes itself to the machine it is running on.

Every title you animate is drawn as a picture, and a render holds a batch of them in memory at once. How big that batch was had been fixed for years at a number chosen against a limit of the encoder rather than against memory — which is generous on a short video and reckless on a long 4K one, and which knew nothing about the computer it happened to be running on. It is worked out now, from the machine actually present and from what a picture actually costs: about thirteen megabytes at 1080p and four times that at 4K.

On a capable computer nothing changes — the same project is cut into the same twelve pieces it always was. On one short of memory it is cut into twenty-seven, or forty-three, instead of failing. And a render that finds itself heavier than expected halves its next piece rather than pressing on into a wall.

CNEX Cloud does the same thing now, and that is what lets a long or title-heavy export finish at all. One 4K project here needed more memory in a single pass than the largest machine we run; cut into four windows it peaks at a third of that. Where a video plainly fits in one pass it still goes in one pass, because seams are not free and the arithmetic can tell the difference.

Also in this release: a cloud render that runs out of memory now says so instead of being filed as an anonymous stall, which is what stopped it being retried on a bigger machine.

Exporting works again, on your own computer and in the cloud.

Version 2.4.2 opened up two things that had been closed — rendering a project whose backdrop is a shape, and sending long videos to the cloud — and each of them then met a wall a little further along. This release takes down both walls.

Rendering on your own computer refused with a message about the drawing instructions being too large. The limit was ours rather than the encoder's, and an ordinary 4K project with animated titles goes past it honestly: one measured stretch was four hundred kilobytes of instructions across just thirty-five layers, because a hand-drawn easing curve becomes a long piece of arithmetic. The encoder renders that stretch in twenty seconds without complaining. The instructions now travel in a file rather than on the command line, which is also what stops a longer video from failing before it starts.

Exporting to CNEX Cloud failed at the last step before the job began, while sending the drawn titles. Our storage refuses anything that does not declare it is being stored encrypted, and that upload did not — so it was turned away with a bare "403" that explained nothing. It says so now, and the editor sends exactly what the server asks it to rather than guessing, so the two cannot fall out of step again.

Also in this release: an editor newer than the service it is talking to sends the titles the old way instead of failing, so an update to one never breaks the other.

Long videos now reach the cloud, and a colour can be your backdrop.

Exporting a long or title-heavy video to CNEX Cloud used to fail, and it failed in the least helpful way possible: the progress ring sat at nought per cent for minutes and then gave up. The reason was that every picture the editor draws for an animated title — and a title whose colour or size changes gets a fresh one about fifteen times a second — was being packed inside the request that starts the export. One ordinary promo came to four hundred and thirty-nine pictures, far more than a single request is allowed to carry. Those pictures now go straight to storage and the export simply points at them, so the length of your video is no longer what decides whether it can be exported at all.

The editor also stopped drawing the same picture over and over. A title that flourishes on and then sits still was being redrawn for every fraction of a second it stayed on screen, which is work nobody ever sees. It is drawn once and held now, so the wait before a cloud export starts is shorter as well.

A project whose backdrop is a shape or a solid colour, with the film composited above it, can be rendered on your own computer again. It used to be told it had no video on the main layer, and that quietly forced every export to the cloud with the free option greyed out and no way to choose it. Both renderers now lay a plain black base under a timeline built that way, which is exactly what they already did for a gap between two clips.

Also in this release: cancelling an export stops it properly, including during the minutes it spends drawing titles — before, it cleared the screen while the work carried on in the background and then started the export anyway, spending credits on something you had just called off; the export screen counts the titles off as it draws them rather than showing nothing at all; and a project kept in the cloud now offers to render in the cloud by default, while leaving your own computer free to choose.

Two things 2.4.0 got wrong.

Timeline thumbnails could simply stop appearing, and stay stopped until you reopened the project. The editor keeps an eye on how hard your computer is working so it can quietly pause background jobs — drawing thumbnails, measuring audio — when the machine is genuinely struggling. It was also treating "not much free memory" as a machine in trouble. On a Mac that is close to meaningless: the system deliberately keeps most of your memory filled with things it can drop in an instant, so a perfectly healthy computer looks short of room all the time. Worse, once it had made that call it had no way to unmake it, so the pause lasted for the rest of the session. It now decides by whether the app is actually keeping up with you, and it can always change its mind back.

The second was quieter and, in its way, worse. When an upload failed, the app kept trying — and told you nothing. It had no idea why it had failed, because the reason was being thrown away before it got there, so a full cloud account and a moment of bad wifi looked identical to it. One meant "wait"; the other meant "this will never work until somebody does something", and it treated both as "wait", forever.

A failed upload now says what actually happened. If your cloud storage is full it says so and offers to take you there. If the workspace has signed out, it says that instead. If there is simply no connection, it says that and keeps trying, because that one really is worth waiting for. And when trying again genuinely cannot help, it stops and asks you rather than working away at something impossible. Your file was never in danger through any of this — it is written to your own disk the moment it arrives, and stays there until the copy in the cloud is real.

Also in this release: a file added before your workspace had finished loading is no longer left untracked on your disk — it is picked up, shown, and uploaded like anything else.

Your work stops depending on everything going right.

Until now, a clip you recorded or dropped onto the timeline lived only in the app's memory while it uploaded. That is fine when the upload works. When it did not — a full account, a dropped connection, a laptop closed at the wrong moment — the clip kept a reference to something that no longer existed anywhere, and the project saved that reference as though it were real. The edit survived; the footage did not. This release makes that impossible.

Anything that enters the editor is now written to your own disk first, before a single thing on the timeline refers to it. The upload happens behind that copy rather than in front of it, so a failure is no longer a loss — it is a retry. Those retries carry on by themselves, back off politely when the network is genuinely down, and resume the next time you open the app rather than dying with the window. When the upload finally lands, the local copy is cleared away on its own.

Your timeline is treated the same way. Every save is written to this computer before it is sent to the server, with the previous versions kept behind it, so the worst a crash or a power cut can cost you is a second or two rather than everything since the last save that happened to get through. If the app closes unexpectedly it says so when you next open it, and opening that project offers you the newer copy from your own machine — offered, never forced, because which version is the real one is your decision and not ours. When you close a project, the app reads back what the server actually stored and compares it against what it sent; if they differ, it keeps your local copy and tells you.

And when something truly cannot be saved, you hear about it immediately and with somewhere to go. A full cloud account now asks what you would like to do — free up space, add more, or keep that file on this device only — instead of a warning that scrolls past. A full hard drive says so plainly, with the cache-clearing screen one click away. Opening a project that has a genuinely broken clip in it now names the clip up front, with the trims and effects you gave it still intact, so relinking the right file restores your work completely.

Also in this release: clips still waiting to upload are visible rather than assumed, and closing the window while one is genuinely at risk asks you first.

Clips that combine, an account menu where you expect it, and an editor that knows when to rest.

Until now, giving a run of clips the same look meant giving it to each of them one at a time, and remembering to do it all again every time you changed your mind. Select clips that sit next to each other on a layer and choose "Combine into one clip", and they become a single block: it moves, copies and deletes as one, and a colour grade, an effect, a fade or a transform applied to it lands across the whole run at once. Nothing is baked in. Take it apart again and every clip is exactly as it was, with its own trims and its own thumbnails.

Your account, billing, connections and storage have moved into the CNEX-Cut menu at the top of the screen, next to About, where a Mac application is supposed to keep them. Before this they were reachable only from the small round avatar on the projects screen, which meant that the moment you opened a project there was no way to reach them at all without putting your work away first.

The editor is also considerably lighter on your computer than it was. The preview had been redrawing the whole composition sixty times a second for as long as it was open: while playing, but equally while paused, while you sat reading the screen, and while the window was hidden behind something else. It now does that work when there is a reason for it and rests when there is not. The timeline, separately, was redrawing every clip on it sixty times a second during playback purely to move the playhead line along; it now moves the line and leaves everything else alone. A title standing still, or a colour grade that is not animating, is no longer rebuilt frame after frame after frame. On a long project none of this was subtle — it was most of what your fans were for.

And when a machine genuinely is short of room, the editor now notices and says so. It watches how much your computer is actually struggling and gives up the work you cannot see first: the thumbnails and waveforms it prepares quietly in the background. Playback and the frame under the playhead are never touched, so what is on screen stays honest. A small badge appears to say the device is under load, because a laptop running out of memory otherwise looks exactly like a broken application, and you deserve to know which of the two you are looking at. Opening a project on a computer below what CNEX-Cut recommends now mentions it once, plainly, and then gets out of the way; it has never stopped you and still does not.

Also in this release: downloading a clip from your media library actually downloads it now, with a notice while the file is being prepared and a way to jump straight to it once it has saved; a new menu item shows you where any clip lives, on your own disk or in your cloud files; and finishing a custom speed curve from the clip itself now finishes it everywhere, instead of leaving the side panel insisting you had not.

A title with a keyframe moves again, and position is a number you can set.

Give a title a keyframe and it could no longer be dragged on the stage. The stage was drawing it where the keyframe said, while the drag was writing the old static position underneath — so nothing you did could show. A drag now lands in the keyframe at the playhead, the same way a video layer's does, and a title without keyframes moves the way it always did. Either way a drag is one undo step; before this, moving a plain title was not undoable at all.

The Edit tab now has a Position section for titles, video layers and shapes: X and Y as sliders, with a number beside each you can type. It reads the keyframe at the playhead when the clip is animated and the plain placement when it is not, and writes to the same place, so dragging on the stage and typing a number are two ways of doing one thing.

In the Motion tab the keyframe strip now behaves like the timeline it stands for. Click a keyframe and the playhead lands on it; press anywhere else and drag to scrub; drag a keyframe and the playhead comes with it, so the frame you are moving is the one on screen. A click no longer nudges a keyframe by a few milliseconds — nothing is retimed until the pointer has really moved.

Your rendered animations are back, and keyframes you can shape.

Every animation rendered with AI Animate went missing the next time the app opened. The file was there the whole time — the app had simply forgotten it was allowed to read its own output, and threw that permission away on every launch. It keeps it now. And because a render is filed under the clip it belongs to, a clip can find its own render again even when that link is gone for good, so a project that opened broken will repair itself rather than ask you for a file.

Open the Motion tab and each keyframe now shows what it changes: position, size, rotation, opacity, text size, colour, gradient angle — each with a slider you can drag or a number you can type, right there under the keyframe. Things that have their own tab, like shadows and glows, read out with an Edit… button that takes you to them while recording onto that keyframe. A property is listed once it genuinely changes, and stays listed once you have animated it, so moving something and moving it back does not make it disappear.

Every keyframe has a curve. Pick one of the named shapes, pick Sudden to hold still and cut, or pick Custom and drag two handles on a graph — the line you draw is exactly the line that plays, in the preview and in the file. Beside each property there is the same picker, so one property can take a curve of its own: a title can slide smoothly while its colour snaps. A property with its own curve keeps it when you change the keyframe's, and the keyframe's picker has an Apply to all button for when you want everything back in step.

Also in this release: a glow added at a later keyframe now fades in rather than being on from the first frame; the right-click menu on a clip shows the S and delete shortcuts beside Split and Delete; and the project file carries all of this, so a project saved here opens the same way everywhere.