Your rushes never
leave the room.
Point the editor at a folder and start cutting. There is no upload, no queue and no storage tier to run out of — the timeline opens on your files where they already are, and they stay there.
An editor in a browser asks for your afternoon first.
Everything has to arrive on a server before anything can happen to it. On a phone clip that is a moment. On a card of 4K rushes it is the rest of the morning, and you cannot start until it ends.
Nothing can be cut until the upload finishes.
The files never move. The timeline opens on them where they are.
12 GB of rushes over a 40 Mbit/s upload. Your connection, your maths.
Free usually means one project.
When footage has to be uploaded, the size of a free plan is the size of its cloud storage — and a single 4K clip can be most of a gigabyte. The generosity runs out halfway through the second edit, which is exactly when you have committed to it.
Editing off your own disk removes that arithmetic entirely. There is no per-project ceiling, because nothing is being stored for you. Cloud space stops being the wall you hit and goes back to being what it should be — sync, backup, and handing work to somebody else.
- UnlimitedProjects on the free plan
- UnlimitedFootage, at any size
- 0 bytesUploaded before you can cut
The page never learns where your files are.
"Local" is easy to say and easy to get wrong. An editor that could read any path on request would be one bad dependency away from reading everything you own. So the editor never handles a path at all.
- 01
You pick, in the system dialog
The one your operating system draws — the app cannot open it on anything you did not choose, and cannot browse past it.
- 02
The app keeps the map, privately
Your choice becomes a random handle paired to that file. The map lives in the desktop app, in the part of it the web page cannot reach.
- 03
The editor asks by handle
Frames are served for handles that are in the map, and for nothing else. A request for anything you did not pick has nowhere to resolve.
- 04
The handles are unguessable
Random identifiers rather than anything derived from the path, so they cannot be enumerated — and they mean nothing outside your own copy of the app.
What the editor actually holds for a clip on your disk — an opaque handle, minted when you picked the file and meaningless to anything else:
cnex-local://8f2c41b6-9e07-4d5a-a1f8-3b6c0d92ee54Not a filename. Not a folder. Nothing that can be guessed, walked or widened — a handle to one file you chose, and to nothing else on the machine.
Some things do go out. You send them.
Stays on your machine
- Your footage, at full resolution
- Your project, while it is a file on your disk
- Playback, scrubbing and every edit you make
- Renders you run on your own machine
- Voice clean-up, which runs here
Leaves only when you ask
- A prompt, when you generate a clip or a still
- The audio of a clip, when you ask for captions
- A project you deliberately save to the cloud
- A render you deliberately send to the cloud
Every one of those is a button you press, not a background job. Nothing is uploaded to make the editor work, because the editor does not need it.
It opens on the same files, without asking again.
The permission you gave a folder is remembered between sessions, so a project reopens straight onto your footage — no re-picking every clip, no relinking dialog, and no "media offline" the first morning you come back to it.
The fastest upload is the one you skip.
Free, no watermark, and your footage stays exactly where you put it.