Introduction
Most free online video editors work the same way: you upload your footage to a server, wait, edit through a thin preview, wait again for the render, and get a watermark unless you pay. For a short clip that is tolerable. For a 2 GB screen recording or a wedding reel it is slow, and your footage sits on someone else's machine.
ToolBuddy's Video Workstation takes the other route. The timeline, the preview, the effects and the export all run in your browser, on your device. Your files never leave your computer or phone, there is no account and no watermark, and the export is a real MP4 (H.264) or WebM at up to 4K on a desktop and 1080p on a phone.
This guide walks through a complete edit: importing media, cutting on the multi-track timeline, adding titles and transitions, generating captions, and exporting a file that plays everywhere.
Start a project and bring in your media
Open the Video Workstation and drop your videos, pictures and music onto the start card, or choose Add media. You can select many files at once: they are placed in sequence on the main video track, and each sound file gets its own audio track, so a vlog with three clips and a music bed is on the timeline in one step.
Nothing is copied or uploaded. The workstation reads the files in place and keeps a project on this device, so if you close the tab and come back, Resume puts you where you left off. If a file was moved in the meantime, the workstation lists it and asks you to find it again before you export.
- MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and M4V video; PNG, JPG and WebP pictures; MP3, WAV, M4A and OGG sound.
- A 250 MB file hand-over from the other ToolBuddy video tools (compressor, trimmer, converter) opens straight on the timeline.
- Installed as an app, the workstation opens video files from your system's Open with menu.
Cut and arrange on the multi-track timeline
The timeline has video, text and audio tracks with thumbnails and waveforms. Use Select to move clips, Blade to cut at the playhead (or press S), and Ripple delete to close the gap after removing a clip. Roll and slip edits adjust a cut without moving everything after it, and snapping keeps edges aligned to other clips, markers and the playhead.
Every edit is undoable, and the ⌘K action search jumps to any command or time. Split a clip's sound from its picture with Detach audio when you want to keep the picture and replace the voice, or use Speed (0.1× to 4×) and freeze frames for emphasis.
- I and O set an in and out range; the export dialog can render only that range.
- Markers (M) label beats and cut points, and clips snap to them.
- Copy, paste, duplicate and nudge work across tracks.
Titles, transitions and looks
Insert a text clip for a title or lower third: 19 fonts, size, colour or gradient, outline, shadow, background box, letter spacing and 13 text animations such as typewriter, slide and pop. Fourteen presets give you a ready style in one click, and the preview is editable directly, so drag the title where it belongs.
Between clips, pick one of 27 transitions (crossfade, dips, wipes, pushes, zooms, blinds, clock) for one cut or for every cut at once. On a clip, the Video tab has brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth, tint, vignette, grain and blur, 20 filters and 18 colour-grading presets with a strength slider, plus a blurred-background fill for vertical footage on a horizontal frame.
- Keyframes on position, size, rotation, opacity and volume, with easing and nine motion presets (zoom in, pan and zoom, pop in, fade).
- Crop and flip per clip; the project frame can be 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 or custom.
- Fades at the start and end of any clip, picture or sound.
Captions that are generated on your device
Open Captions and choose Generate: speech recognition runs on your device (English, with word timing), in windows of five minutes, so a long talk is captioned without sending audio anywhere. The cue list lets you fix words, find and replace, shift timing, and import an existing SRT or VTT file.
Eight caption styles include word highlight, pop and karaoke. At export you choose whether the captions are drawn into the picture or left out and downloaded as SRT, VTT or plain text next to the video.
Export MP4 or WebM, up to 4K, with no watermark
Export offers quick presets (Best quality, Web 1080p, Under 25 MB, Under 10 MB) or your own size, format, codec and quality. Choose MP4 with H.264 for a file that plays everywhere, HEVC or AV1 for smaller files, or WebM. By-size export computes the bitrate that fits a target such as 24 MB for email.
The workstation checks that your browser can encode the exact size and bitrate before it starts; if the codec you picked cannot, it falls back to another codec or to WebM and tells you. Progress shows the time left, and the finished file can be downloaded or handed to the Video Compressor, Converter or Watermark tools in one click.
- Desktop: up to 4K (2160p). Phones: up to 1080p, to stay within their memory.
- A file that was moved since you last opened the project is listed before the export, with a Choose file button, or you can export without it.
- Long exports warn before you close the tab.
When to use the single-purpose video tools instead
If you only need one operation, the dedicated tools are quicker: Video Trimmer for a cut, Video Compressor for a size target, Video Converter for a format change, Video to GIF, Social Video Resizer for a 9:16 crop, or Caption Styler for subtitles on a finished video. Each one offers Continue in the Video Workstation under its result when you want to keep editing.
Everything here runs on your device, so the practical limits are your machine's memory and the browser's codecs, not a server queue or a plan tier.
Written by
Ankit Kumar
Senior Software Engineer & Founder at ToolBuddy
Engineering browser-first utilities with zero upload requirements using WebAssembly, Web Audio, and Canvas technologies.
