lodestone

The whole design hinges on two gestures meaning different things. Dropping a filter on top of a clip stacks it — modifiers apply upwards, and the order is drawn on the board rather than implied by a sidebar. Dropping a clip beside another one means play this, then that: the ordinary cut.

A node editor that merges the two makes "apply a look" and "play these in sequence" the same action, and after that neither one reads clearly. Keeping them separate costs a concept and buys a board you can understand at a glance.

Losing the timeline cannot mean losing frame accuracy. Each clip is its own miniature timeline: in trim mode its width is proportional to its duration, so the horizontal position of the cursor maps directly onto a source frame, and the status bar shows pixels per frame so the precision available is never a guess.

Hovering scrubs, clicking drops a pin that snaps to scene cuts and clip edges, comma and full stop step the pin a frame at a time, and typing a timecode goes straight there. Seams between snapped clips are grabbable, which rolls the edit — trimming one side while extending the other, the operation a single pin cannot express.