Guide · OtterStudio

Why OtterStudio asks for your files again

Come back to OtterStudio the next day and it offers to reopen yesterday's edit. Choose it, and the first thing it does is ask you to point at the video again. That is not a fault. It is the price of the one promise the tool makes, and this page explains the deal.

Open OtterStudio →

What a project is

A project is a description of what you did: which files you used, where each cut is, where each clip sits on the timeline and on the picture, how loud each track is. Written down, that is a few kilobytes. It is saved in your browser's own storage on every edit, so closing the tab loses nothing.

The video is not in it. A two-gigabyte file stays in your folder, exactly where it was. We never had it: OtterStudio opens the file the way a video player does, reads it as it plays, and keeps nothing. Storing a copy in the browser would mean a second two gigabytes on your disk, and in most browsers storage of that size gets quietly deleted when space runs low. Storing it on our servers would mean uploading it, which is the thing this whole site exists to avoid.

So a saved project knows about your files. It does not have them.

Reopening one

When there is something saved, OtterStudio opens with a list of your projects. Pick one and you get its files page: every file the project used, with a Choose button next to each. Pick the same file from your disk and it is checked against a fingerprint of the one you used. If it matches, the row says so. If it has the same name but the contents have changed, because you re-exported it, the row says "different version" and uses it anyway. If it does not look like the right file at all, you are told, and it is still used, because you know your files better than a checksum does.

Choose files… lets you pick several at once, and they are handed out to the right rows by fingerprint. Anything that fits nothing is set aside rather than guessed at.

The one-click version

In Chrome and Edge, if you added a file through the file picker rather than by dragging it in, the browser can give OtterStudio a handle to it: a reference it is allowed to keep, but only allowed to use again once you say so. When a project has those, the files page shows an Open the files button. Press it and the browser asks your permission to read the files, and they come back without you finding them in a folder. Firefox and Safari do not offer this yet, so there the button is not shown.

Opening without the files

Open as is opens the project with whatever you have supplied, which can be nothing. Every clip whose file is missing is still on the timeline in its place, drawn as a grey box, and its lane shows File missing with a Choose button. Supply the file whenever you like and the picture comes back. You can rearrange, trim and split blank clips in the meantime; only the picture and sound are missing.

If you export with a file still missing, that clip comes out as the grey box and silence. The export dialog tells you before you start.

Cleaned-up audio

If you used Remove noise, the clean copy is not a file on your disk either; it was made in the tab. It is listed on the files page as something to be rebuilt, and once you supply the recording it came from, it is regenerated automatically from that. You will see the button fill up again.

Moving to another computer

Save project downloads the same description as a small file, your-project.otterstudio.json. It is plain text; open it in a text editor and you can read exactly what was kept. Put it on the other computer with the media, open OtterStudio there, choose Open a project file… in the projects dialog, and you land on the same files page.

The same file is a backup. Browser storage is per browser and per device, and clearing site data clears it, so if an edit matters, save the file too.

Forgetting a project

The small cross next to a project in the list removes it from the browser. Your video is not touched; it was never ours to touch.