September: an editor worth the name, and fewer dead ends

September took the edit step from captions, framing and three effects to a timeline with memes, sounds, stickers and b-roll, and closed a run of places where Reelium used to stop and refuse you. None of it was announced while it happened. The changelog now has all of it, in 28 entries; this is the shape of the month, and the few things I would want to be told before I hit them.

The edit step is an editor now

At the start of the month, the step where you finish a clip did captions, framing and three effects. It now has a large preview you work on directly and a full timeline underneath, and everything you can put on a clip sits behind one Add media button: click a card to drop it at the playhead, or drag it where you want it.

• Memes. Search meme templates or tap a reaction — Suspicious, Confused, Shocked — and drag one onto the clip. There are 21 meme sounds next to them, each with a Listen button, so you hear it before it goes on.
• Stickers and your own emotes. Emoji, eight shapes including a censor bar and an arrow, and your channel's own Twitch, 7TV and BTTV emotes once Twitch is connected.
• Sound effects, up to ten a clip, with an optional dip in the stream audio underneath each one.
• Your own files — images, short sounds, and b-roll video cut in full frame or picture-in-picture.
• Two new effects. Freeze holds the picture while the audio keeps running. Callout puts text or an emoji over the frame, aimed by dragging it on the preview.
• The timeline splits, reorders and repeats sections, sets a section's speed, fades between them and takes music beds. S splits, Delete removes, Ctrl or Cmd+Z undoes.

The one I expect to get used most is the smallest: Run hype pass places zooms, shakes and sounds on the laughter and loud moments Reelium already detected in the clip, as a single step you can undo. I want to be straight about what that is. It decorates moments that were measured; it does not decide whether the clip is good, and it will not find a moment the analysis did not. Running it again only replaces what it placed, so nothing you put there yourself is touched.

You can now choose a clip length before analysis — Punchy, Standard, Longer, or let Reelium decide — and the trim chips only ever offer a length shorter than the moment the picker found. And a saved look can belong to one channel, so if you clip more than one streamer, each keeps their own captions and framing.

Fewer places where Reelium just said no

A lot of September went on the moments where the product used to stop.

• Long streams. A VOD longer than your plan allows in one go, or longer than the Studio minutes you have left, was refused outright. Reelium now offers to analyse a slice of it, lets you choose where the slice starts, and tells you the cost before you agree.
• Streams that are still live are refused before any minutes are reserved, with the reason, rather than after.
• Short moments. A strong 22-second moment used to be dropped for being shorter than the length you were aiming for. It is now kept at its own length, and never padded.
• Renders. If one item in an edit could not be loaded, the whole render failed — sometimes after it had been charged. It now leaves that item out, renders the rest, and tells you exactly what it left out. A render that dies without reporting back is given up on after 45 minutes rather than sitting at "rendering" for hours.
• Scheduled posts whose clip had never been rendered used to fail at their slot. Reelium now starts the render and posts once it is done — late, but posted.

Reviewing, alone or with a team

Home is now where you review: the clip waiting for you plays inline beside Keep, Edit and Skip, with the queue next to it. Pressing play never records a decision. If you have auto-post on, Keep says "Keep & queue", because that is what it does.

Teams were rebuilt around clips rather than seats: a pipeline from Up next to Ready to post, assignees and due dates, and a review desk where feedback is pinned to a moment in the clip. An owner or admin approves. Approving does not publish anything, which is deliberate.

Account and billing

Changing or resetting your password now signs you out everywhere else and keeps you signed in where you made the change. If you already pay for a plan, choosing another one now changes your subscription instead of quietly starting a second one alongside it. And deleting your account cancels your subscription first, and deletes nothing if that cancellation fails.

Three things worth knowing before you hit them

• Re-sync costs minutes now. Re-syncing subtitles used to re-time them from a transcript we already had, which could leave the same drift in place. It now transcribes the clip's audio again, which is the only version that fixes anything, and like any transcription it uses Studio minutes.
• Check old 9:16 strip designs. The export now draws that layout's caption bar on every frame, as the preview always did. A hook set to "Below" in an older strip design now sits under the bar. Move it up.
• An uploaded GIF does not animate reliably in the export. Twitch and 7TV emotes do; BTTV emotes are placed as stills.

As ever: if something breaks, reply to the welcome email. It lands in my inbox.

— Max