Add as many as you like; they line up in order. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Volume
Select a clip on the strip to change how loud that shot is.
No music yet — add a track from the Music tab and its level appears here.
Zoom
Pinch-zoom on a phone zooms the whole page, so the timeline gets its own controls. Zoom in to land a cut exactly where you want it.
Opens on whatever shape your clip already is — nothing gets cropped until you choose.
Silences this shot only — the others keep their sound, and music keeps playing.
Zoom — 1.00× PositionFreezes the final frame and holds it — for an ending, or to give a title room. Silent while held.
Select a clip on the strip to reframe just that one.
Behind your videoShows around a fitted clip — a colour, or a slow gradient. Good for demo videos.
Applies to the selected clip.
Drops a look layer from the playhead to the end. Drag its edges to cover the clips you want; click it to dial its look.
Your project
Your video never reaches our servers. A .struna file is the edit only — about a kilobyte. Opening one reconnects to those files. A recipe is a project with no footage — open one, then add your video.
Goes into the Footage tab — double-click a clip there to mark the part you want. Your first video also goes straight onto the timeline. Dropped on the timeline, a file goes in right there.
Video picked here sits over your footage; dropped on the timeline it becomes a clip.
MP4 · MOV · WebM · PNG · JPG · HEIC · WebP · SVG · GIF — or a see-through WebM from Typo, Callout, Background.
Drag it on the picture to move it.
MP3 · M4A · WAV · AAC · OGG · FLAC. It stops when your video does.
Already have a subtitle file? Drop the .srt or .vtt on here and it burns into the video.
No subtitle file? Save the audio, run it through whatever transcriber you already use on your own machine, and bring the .srt back here. It saves as 16 kHz mono, which is what those tools want.
This writes a small file — about a kilobyte of edit decisions — into your own storage. Your video does not go with it and never reaches our servers.
Tell us what you were doing and what happened. Rough is fine — “added music, pressed export, nothing” is a good report.
Sent with it, so we can tell what you were running:
No filenames and nothing from your video — just counts, so we know the shape of the edit.
Opening replaces what is on the timeline now, and it can’t be undone. Save your project first if you want to keep it.
Your video is .
Nothing you've done is at risk — but if it does give up, it gives up at the end, after the wait. Save your project first and you can come back to it.
Right now Struna edits in Chrome or Edge on a computer. A phone doesn’t yet give a web page what it takes to decode many clips at once and write your finished video. You can still open a project and look around here.
Want Struna on your phone? Tell us. Every message moves it up the list. Say what you’d make with it: contact us, or post it and tag @startingframe with #startingframe. We read all of it.
Struna never uploaded your video. A project file is only the edit — the cuts, the trims, the looks, the titles. Your footage stayed where you keep it, which is exactly why Struna has to be pointed back at it. Matching filenames are found for you. Picked the wrong one? Choose again.
The keys most editors already know. They work when you are not typing in a text box.
Save your project before you close the tab. File › Save project (⌘S) writes a small .struna file holding your whole edit — cuts, trims, looks, titles, subtitles. It does not hold your footage, so keep it next to your clips; opening it asks you to point at them again.
Where your video actually lives
Wherever you keep it — and never on our servers. Struna edits in the browser, so your footage is read straight off your own drive. It is never uploaded to us, and there is no copy of it anywhere in Starting Frame.
What you can save to Dropbox, Drive or OneDrive is the project file: a kilobyte of text describing your edit. Open it again — on this machine or another — and Struna reconnects to the video files where they already are.
That is also why a project needs its clips. Move or rename them and Struna will ask you to point at them again; the edit survives, it just has to be shown where the footage went.
If you import a clip from your own cloud, your browser downloads it directly from Dropbox or Drive — that traffic goes between you and them, not through us.
Get your video in
Click + Import footage in the Footage tab, or Add › Footage…, or drop files on the page. Add as many clips as you like — they line up in order, end to end, no gaps. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; it all happens on your device.
Cut it
Drag the playhead to move through the video. Split cuts at the playhead. Drag a clip to reorder it; drag a clip’s edges to trim it. Undo (⌘Z) takes back your last edit — keep pressing to walk further back. The button left of the time jumps to the previous cut; Home goes to the start.
Where everything is
Along the top — five menus: File (open, save, export), Edit, Add, View and Help. Every command is in one of them, with its key beside it. Edit and Graphics switch between cutting and making a graphic. The shape of your video (16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5) is the button next to Export.
On the left — what you bring in: Footage, Music, Graphics and Subtitles.
On the right — Properties of whatever you selected. A clip shows its Position (Fill or Fit, zoom, keyframes), its Look (six looks and four dials) and its Volume. A graphic, b-roll or music shows its own settings. Click a heading to fold it.
Above the timeline — Split, Blade, Remove, Undo, Redo, zoom and Full screen.
Drag the bars between the panels and the picture to give the picture, the panels or the timeline more room. Double-click a bar to put it back. View → Reset the layout puts everything back.
Anything you add appears on its own row above the clip strip — drag it left or right to change when it appears, drag its edges to change how long it stays.
Get your video out
The Export button at the top saves a finished MP4 to your device — sound, titles, looks, subtitles, everything, exactly as you saw it. It imports cleanly into DaVinci Resolve and Premiere.
On a phone
Everything works by touch — drag the bar under the picture to trade space between the picture and the timeline. When you tap Add media, the file list is your phone’s own: on iPhone, cloud drives appear if they’re enabled in the Files app (Browse → ⋯ → Edit Locations).
Sound
The 🔊 speaker next to the transport mutes your footage’s own sound — music you add keeps playing, so you can drop a bed over silent video. Tap it again to bring the original sound back.
On iPhone the volume slider won’t change what you hear. iOS reserves loudness for the hardware buttons, so a web page can’t set it. It still applies to the video you export — and mute works everywhere.
Zooming the timeline
The timeline has its own zoom: −, Fit and + on the bar above it, or the keys − and +. Zoom in when you need to land a cut precisely or grab a short piece you just split.
Make it full screen on your phone
Struna runs better with the browser bars gone. On iPhone, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen — opening it from that icon gives you the whole screen, no address bar, and it keeps working exactly the same. On Android, Chrome offers Install app in its ⋮ menu.
Installing doesn’t change where your work lives — save the project (or export) before you close it, same as in a browser tab.
Or tap ⛶ Full on the timeline bar — it hides Struna’s own header and labels to give the picture the rest of the screen, and on a computer or Android it goes properly full screen too. Tap it again to come back. On iPhone a web page can’t force true full screen — that’s what Add to Home Screen above is for.
Having trouble?
- The badge up top says “Can’t export here” — this browser can’t write a video file. You can still cut and preview; to save the finished video, use Chrome or Edge on a computer, or update your iPhone to the latest iOS and reload. If you need it to work here, tell us — it moves things up the list.
- A clip stays black or won’t open — Struna plays what your browser plays (MP4, MOV, WebM). Share the clip out of your camera app as a plain video file and try that copy.
- Your edit is gone — Struna doesn’t hold it for you. Use Project → Save as you work, and it comes back.
- Something you need isn’t here — say so. Contact us, or post what you’re trying to make and tag @startingframe with #startingframe. Requests from people using it are how Struna gets built.
- A long video is slow to save, or never finishes — writing the file happens on your own machine, and the memory it needs climbs steeply past about ten minutes. Struna warns you before it starts. If a long one won’t finish, split it at a cut, save each half, and join them — two shorter saves work where one long one won’t.
- Something else looks stuck — reload the page. The app comes back clean, and startingframe.com has more of our tools and ways to reach us.
Keyboard, on a computer
space play · JKL back / stop / play · S split · B blade · ↑↓ previous / next cut
The editing keys most editors already know. Every shortcut is listed under the Shortcuts button at the top of the window.
Dragging b-roll, a graphic or music snaps onto the cuts in your video and the playhead · N turns snapping off and on · hold ⌥ Option to drag the other way for one drag
Typing in a text box? The keys type — they only act as shortcuts when the box isn’t focused.
Struna is made by Starting Frame — free tools for people who make video.
Terms of Service · Privacy · About Struna
Your video is read on your own machine and never reaches our servers — there is nowhere for us to keep it.