A video editor that never uploads your files

Most free editors on the web are a front end for someone else’s server. You hand over the footage, wait in a queue, and hope the terms you did not read are reasonable. Kinecard does the work in the tab.

Best on a desktop browser — the editor drives a video encoder, which a phone cannot keep alive.

What “nothing is uploaded” actually means

• The transcription runs on your machine. The speech model is downloaded once and then runs in the tab. Your voiceover is not sent to a transcription service.
• The render runs on your machine. The encoder is the one built into your browser. There is no queue, because there is no queue to join — the export starts when you press the button.
• The project is a file on your disk. Not a row in an account you have to keep paying for to open next year.

This is not a privacy setting that can be switched off later. It is how the thing is built: there is no server to upload to, so there is nothing to change our minds about.

Why anyone would care

Unreleased footage. A client’s material. A face that never consented to being in somebody’s training set. A script that is not public yet. Most of the time none of it matters. The times it does matter, it matters a great deal, and by then the file has already been copied.

There is a duller reason too, and it is the one you will notice daily: nothing is waiting behind a thousand other people on a free tier, and nothing fails at ninety per cent because a server timed out.

What you give up

The trade is real, so here it is before you spend an hour:

• It needs a desktop browser. A phone cannot hold a video encoder open long enough.
• The first load downloads the models. Once, and then they are kept.
• Your machine does the work. A long video on an old laptop takes longer than it would on somebody’s rented GPU.

If what you want is a phone app, this is the wrong tool, and we would rather say so here than after the download.

Free, and specifically what that means