The generative timeline. For finishing touches.

For a long time, the Kaiber workflow ended at "generate." You'd open Superstudio, work in Canvas to produce visuals, run those visuals through Cuts to auto-edit them, and at some point — almost always — you'd hit the limit of what an automated pipeline could do for you. You needed to layer in a custom voiceover. Adjust the timing of a single transition. Add a logo over the third shot. Cut a scene that was a beat too long. Whatever it was, it required a level of manual control that automated tools deliberately don't expose.

So you'd export. You'd download the generations as files. You'd open Premiere or DaVinci or Final Cut. You'd reimport everything. You'd build a new project from scratch. You'd finish the video there. And then, inevitably, halfway through that finishing pass, you'd realize one of the generations needed a re-render — a different angle, a different style, an extension by two more seconds. Now you'd have to bounce all the way back to Kaiber, regenerate, re-export, re-import, replace the clip in your NLE, and lose all the timeline work tied to the old version.

That round-trip is what Kaiber's Mary Zhang — one of the designers behind Editor — describes in her published portfolio writeup: "Users must export selected media to external video editing tools to compile, sequence and edit. Users must switch back and forth between Superstudio and video editing to edit and regenerate clips in their sequence." The friction was real, and it was killing creative momentum. Every context switch between AI generation and timeline editing was a moment where ideas died in transit.

Editor solves this by collapsing the timeline directly into Superstudio. You no longer leave to finish. The clips you generated in Canvas are already in your Media Library. The variations you rendered in Cuts are right there too. You drag them onto a multi-track timeline, sequence them, layer audio, add transitions and text, and export — all in the same browser tab, with no platform jumping. And critically, when you need to regenerate something, you don't break the timeline. The regenerated clip slots back in with all its placement and timing intact. That's the part traditional NLEs simply can't do.

And here's the genuinely surprising part: Editor is free. Timeline Edit, the underlying mode, is available to every Kaiber user — including the no-subscription Flex plan and the free trial. Manual editing in Kaiber doesn't cost credits, doesn't require a subscription tier upgrade, and isn't gated behind any paywall. You can sign up today, drag in your own footage, edit it on a timeline, and export — all without touching a credit balance.

Kaiber's official product description for Editor is one sentence long, and worth reading carefully: "A timeline video editor for sequencing clips, layering audio, adding transitions and text, and exporting in multiple aspect ratios. For full projects or finishing touches." Notice what's there and what isn't. There's no claim about advanced color grading. No claim about complex compositing. No claim about feature-film capability. The scope is deliberately tight — sequence, layer, transition, text, export. That's the whole tool.

Third-party reviews characterize the Editor interface honestly: "Compared to full NLE video editors, the interface is much more basic, with no advanced tools to overwhelm you since the editing options are pretty limited. You mainly use it to split and reorder clips, or add simple captions." Kaiber didn't try to compete with Adobe on feature depth — they tried to make the simplest timeline that could finish a project, and they made it free. The trade-off is intentional.

What Editor does well

Within its chosen scope, Editor is genuinely capable:

• Multi-track timeline · Stack video, audio, and text on independent tracks. Mute, solo, lock or rearrange any of them.
• Trim, split, reorder · The core NLE moves — drag clip edges to trim, split at the playhead, drag-and-drop to reorder, copy/paste sections.
• Built-in transitions · A library of pre-built audio and video transitions for sequencing. Crossfades, dips, hard cuts, dissolves.
• Audio layering · Stack a music bed, voiceover, and sound effects cleanly. Levels are simple but adequate.
• Text overlays · Add titles, lower-thirds, captions, kinetic text. Style is template-driven — you pick a look, not every parameter.
• Multi-aspect export · Render 9:16 vertical, 1:1 square, and 16:9 widescreen in a single export. Intelligent reframing keeps content in-frame.
• Real-time preview · Scrub the timeline and see your edit play back instantly. No render previews required for most actions.
• Auto-save · Every change saves automatically to a section called My Edits. Come back days later, pick up where you left off.

What Editor explicitly doesn't do

It's worth being clear about the limits, because picking the wrong tool is more painful than picking the right one. Editor is not built for: granular per-clip color grading (lift/gamma/gain), complex VFX compositing (motion graphics, masks, rotoscoping), multi-camera angle editing, advanced audio mixing (per-track EQ, compression, automation), proxy workflows for high-resolution footage, or feature-length projects. If your project needs any of those, finish in Premiere, DaVinci, or Final Cut.

For everything else — short-form social, music videos, ad creative, vlog cuts, lyric videos, content that lives between 15 seconds and 4 minutes — Editor handles the whole job.

One detail worth highlighting from Kaiber's official Help Center documentation: "Want to make changes? Go back at any time to make changes to previous steps or completed projects." Editor projects are non-destructive. You can re-open a finished project days or weeks later, swap clips, change transitions, re-export in different aspect ratios, all without losing your earlier work. Every project auto-saves to My Edits — accessible through the toolbar on the left side of the Video Editor at any time.

Most NLE tools have a thousand features and four hundred you'll never use. Editor takes the opposite approach — fewer tools, each one well-tuned for short-form AI video work. The complete toolbox:

If you've used iMovie, CapCut, or any modern simple NLE, Editor will feel familiar within five minutes. The keyboard shortcuts follow standard conventions: spacebar to play/pause, J/K/L for transport control, I/O for in/out points, Cmd-Z for undo. The interface is deliberately conventional in service of speed-of-onboarding — nothing here will surprise you, which is the point.

Open a clip in Premiere or DaVinci, and that clip is just a file. The NLE knows nothing about how the clip was made. If you decide you want a different version — different angle, different style, two more seconds at the end — you have to leave the editor entirely, regenerate it elsewhere, export it as a new file, and replace it in your timeline. Then you have to manually re-time, re-trim, re-fit it into the cut. Every regeneration is a destructive operation against your edit.

Editor inverts that. Every clip on an Editor timeline that came from Canvas remembers its source Flow. That metadata link is preserved in the timeline forever. Right-click a clip and you get options that don't exist in any other NLE:

• Regenerate · Re-run the original Flow with the same prompt and parameters. The output replaces the clip in-place, preserving its timeline position, length, and any transitions or effects layered on top.
• Regenerate with variations · Run the Flow three or five or ten times with subtle variations. Cycle through the variations directly in the timeline, picking the one that fits.
• Extend · Add more seconds to the end of the clip. Editor pulls the last frame as the start image of an extension Flow, generates the extra duration, and stitches it onto the existing clip seamlessly.
• Restyle · Send the clip back through a different model or a different style transfer Flow without changing its content. Useful when you've finished editing and want to swap the entire visual aesthetic.
• Edit prompt · Modify the prompt that generated the original clip and regenerate. Same composition, different content.

This is the genuinely novel thing Kaiber's Editor brings to the timeline-editor category. Editing is no longer a one-way street where you commit to assets and finish. It's a non-destructive loop where you can keep regenerating until you're satisfied — without ever leaving your edit.

How it works in practice

Imagine you're building a 60-second product reel. You've laid down eight clips on the timeline, added a music bed, dropped in transitions, and the cut feels mostly right — except the third shot doesn't quite work. The lighting is wrong; you wanted golden hour, not midday. In a traditional NLE, you'd have to re-shoot or re-render the clip somewhere else, replace the file, and rebuild your edit around it.

In Editor, you right-click the clip, choose Edit prompt, change "midday" to "golden hour," and hit regenerate. Canvas processes the request, the clip on your timeline updates with the new lighting, and your transitions and timing remain exactly as you left them. Total time: about 90 seconds, depending on the model. Total context-switches: zero.

Note: imported media (anything you uploaded from your device rather than generated in Canvas) doesn't have linked-media capabilities — those clips are static files like in any traditional NLE. But anything generated within Kaiber stays connected to its source forever.

For most short-form content shipping in 2026, the same project needs to exist in at least three forms. A 9:16 vertical version for TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts. A 1:1 square version for Instagram feed and LinkedIn. A 16:9 widescreen version for YouTube and most embedded video. Traditionally, this means three separate render passes, three separate cropping passes, and three subtly different versions to manage.

Editor renders all three from a single timeline in a single export. When you click Export, you check which aspect ratios you want — pick one, two, or all three — and Editor processes them simultaneously. The intelligent reframing engine tracks faces, motion centers, and text overlays across the timeline and re-crops each aspect ratio so important content stays in-frame. You don't have to manually re-key for each ratio.

Per-aspect preview

Before you commit to the export, Editor shows a per-aspect preview pane. You can see how each version will look — which crop is happening, where text overlays sit, how transitions land — before any rendering happens. If a particular aspect ratio doesn't work (text overlay gets clipped in 9:16, for instance), you can adjust the source on the timeline once and all three versions update.

Resolution & upscaling

Editor exports at the native resolution of your source clips by default — typically 720p or 1080p depending on what came out of Canvas. If you need crisp 4K for paid ads or YouTube, route the finished export through the Video Upscaler Flow back in Canvas. Upscaling costs additional credits per export but preserves all your edit work; you don't have to rebuild anything to upgrade resolution.

Save points & downloads

Every export also saves to your project's history. If you export a 9:16 today and decide tomorrow you also need a 1:1 version, just open the project from My Edits, click Export, and check the new ratio — Editor only renders the additional version. The previously rendered files remain in your account, available for re-download.

The honest framing: if you're finishing a feature film, mixing a podcast, or compositing complex VFX, you need a real NLE. Editor isn't trying to compete with Premiere on feature depth. But for the 90% of short-form video work that's "stitch a few clips together with music and text and ship it across platforms," Editor is faster, simpler, free, and uniquely capable of regenerating clips inline without breaking the edit.

Most professional Kaiber users keep both tools in their workflow. They use Editor for everything that fits — most short-form deliverables, daily social content, music videos under 4 minutes, ad creative — and bounce out to Premiere or DaVinci for the projects that need granular control. The clean export from Editor lands fine in any pro NLE for those occasions.

Editor is technically the most downstream product in the Kaiber suite. Most projects flow through it last — after Canvas has done the AI generation work and Cuts has done the auto-edit work, Editor is where the human creative decisions get applied. But it doesn't have to work that way; Editor is also a perfectly fine standalone tool for editing footage you already have, even if you never touch the rest of Kaiber.

The connective tissue between all three products is the Media Library. Anything you generate in Canvas lives there. Anything you export from Cuts lives there. Anything you save from Editor lives there. The library is searchable, filterable, taggable, and shared across all three tools. There's no re-importing between products — files generated in Canvas show up in Editor's media browser the moment you switch tabs.

For a typical full project: a creative team might generate stylized character animations in Canvas using a custom-trained model, run them through Cuts with the artist's track for a fast first-cut, drop that project into Editor to layer additional voiceover, add titles and captions, replace a couple of clips that didn't quite work (using the regenerate-from-timeline feature), and export the final master in three aspect ratios. Three products, one continuous workflow, one credit pool.

The free entry point

Notably, Editor's free-for-everyone status makes it the most accessible entry point to the entire Kaiber ecosystem. A user can sign up, edit their own footage on a timeline, and export — all without ever paying anything or even understanding how Canvas or Cuts work. Once they're comfortable, the upgrade path is natural: they import a Canvas-generated clip into their edit, see it work, and graduate into the broader Kaiber workflow.

And once again, who Editor is not for: anyone editing feature-length films, anyone needing professional color grading or audio mixing, anyone working with multi-camera footage, or anyone whose project requires advanced VFX or motion graphics. Those workflows still belong in Adobe, Blackmagic, or Apple's ecosystems. Editor stays focused on what it does best.

Timeline Edit (the underlying mode that powers Editor) is, per Kaiber's own Help Center: "free for all users, including Flex accounts." That includes the no-subscription Flex plan, the 5-day trial, and every paid tier. There's no separate Editor subscription. There's no credit charge for using the timeline. You can edit unlimited projects, save unlimited versions to My Edits, and export at standard resolution — all without ever spending a cent.

Where credits enter the picture is on the edges of the Editor workflow:

• Generating new clips in Canvas · If you regenerate a linked-media clip from the Editor timeline, that regeneration runs through Canvas and costs the standard Canvas credit rate for that model.
• Upscaling exports · Standard Editor exports come out at native resolution. Pushing through the Video Upscaler to 1080p or 4K costs additional credits per export.
• Adding AI-generated audio · If you use Stable Audio inside the timeline to generate music or SFX, that generation costs credits.

For an editor working with their own pre-shot footage and their own audio, the entire Editor workflow remains free. The credit charges only kick in when you specifically use AI generation features within the editor.