How to use Easy Life Editor

Part one — open it and look at it

Before cutting anything, see what you have.

1. Open your recording

   Press Open a recording… at the bottom of the window and choose your video file.

   You should see the first frame of your video in the black box, and a single blue block filling the strip underneath it. One block means the editor has the whole recording and has taken nothing away.

2. Check where finished videos will go

   Look at the box marked Save finished videos in. It is filled in for you with a folder that really exists. Type a different one and press Save if you want somewhere else.

   If you type a folder that is not there you get a red banner telling you to make it yourself, copy its full address, and come back. That is deliberate. A program that quietly makes folders leaves a mess you never asked for.

3. Watch the whole thing once

   Press Play and let it run to the end. Press Restart to go back to the beginning and play again.

   You should see the clock counting up and a thin line travelling across the blue strip. That line is the playhead, and everything you do next happens where it is.

Part two — cut out what you do not want

Taking something out of the middle is two cuts and a delete.

1. Put the playhead where the bad part starts

   Click the blue strip at that moment, or type the number of seconds in the box beside the clock and press Move to.

   The clock tells you exactly where you are. Typing is the way to be precise; clicking is the way to be quick.

2. Cut

   Press Cut here.

   One block becomes two, and the video is exactly as long as it was. Cutting takes nothing away — it only decides where one piece ends and the next begins, which is why cutting in the wrong place costs you nothing.

3. Cut again at the far end of the bad part

   Move the playhead there and press Cut here a second time.

   Three blocks now, and the bad part is the middle one.

4. Delete the middle piece

   In The pieces, find the row whose two numbers match the part you want gone, and press its Delete.

   The video gets shorter and the strip drops to two blocks. Your recording on disk still has every second of itself — the editor has only stopped listing that stretch among the pieces it will use.

5. Watch the join

   Press Restart and watch the moment where the two pieces meet.

   What you are watching is the finished video, not the recording. The editor plays your original file and jumps from the end of one piece to the start of the next, exactly as the rendered file will.

Part three — get a cut exactly right

Clicking gets you close. Typing gets you exact.

1. Change a piece by typing its times

   In The pieces, change Starts at or Ends at on any row and press Set.

   Those two numbers are times in your original recording, not in the finished video. A row saying "starts at 15.0" means begin this piece fifteen seconds into the file I recorded.

   Ask for something impossible and it is brought inside what is possible, and told to you. An end past the end of your recording becomes the end of your recording, and the banner says so. You are never left wondering whether the button worked.

2. Put the pieces in a different order

   Press Go to on a row to pick that piece out, then Move left or Move right.

   The length never changes when you reorder. And the first piece refuses to move left, in plain words, rather than doing nothing and leaving you guessing.

Part four — put sound over it

Rows of sound sit under the strip of pieces, on the same scale, so you can see your narration against the picture it is about.

1. Turn the recording's own sound down, or off

   The first row is the sound that came with your recording. Drag its slider, or type a number in the box beside it, or tick Off.

   You hear the change straight away. 100 is exactly as it was recorded. Turn it off when the room was noisy and you are going to talk over the top instead.

2. Add a row

   Press Add a track.

   A row appears, called Narration the first time, Music the second and Effects the third. Type over the name to call it anything you like.

3. Put a sound on it, where you want it

   Move the playhead to the moment you want the sound to start, then press Add a sound… on that row and choose a file.

   It goes in at the playhead. Any sound file works, and a video file works too — the picture in it is ignored and its sound used, which is what you want if you recorded yourself talking on a phone.

4. Move it, or use only part of it

   Each sound has three numbers. Starts at is the moment in the finished video it begins. Uses from and Until say which part of the sound file to use. Change them and press Set.

   That is how you cut the throat-clearing off the front of a take without recording it again, and still have the clean part land exactly where you want it.

5. Make the music sit under your voice

   On your music row, tick Under the voices.

   When the video is made, that row turns itself down by about eleven decibels whenever anybody is speaking on a row that is not ticked, and comes back up when the talking stops. That is what makes music sit politely under a tutorial instead of fighting it.

   You will not hear this while editing. The window plays each row through its own player, and one player cannot listen to another and duck itself. It is done by the part that writes the file, and only there.

Two sounds cannot overlap on one row. If you want two things heard at the same moment, put the second on its own row. That is what rows are for. And when you delete a piece of picture, the sound after it moves back by the same amount, so your narration stays with the part it was about.

Part five — save it and make the video

The project remembers your work. The render writes the file.

1. Save the project

   Press Save project.

   A small file appears in your folder. It holds the address of your recording, the pieces, and the rows of sound. It holds no video and no sound of its own, which is why it is tiny — and why moving your recording later would leave it with nothing to work from. The editor tells you which file has gone rather than quietly making the video without it.

2. Make the video

   Press Render.

   A percentage climbs beside the button, and the button says Stop while it works. When it finishes you get a green banner naming the file it saved and how long it is.

3. Go and get it

   Press Open folder.

   What you have is an .mp4 with H.264 picture and AAC sound at 48,000 hertz in stereo, with its index at the front. That is exactly what YouTube asks for, so it goes straight up without being converted into anything else first. Nothing is ever written over — render twice and you get a second file.

What it does not do yet

Said plainly, so you know before you start rather than after.

• No titles, no zoom, no transitions. It cuts, it reorders, and it mixes sound. A join between two pieces is a hard cut.
• Windows only at the moment. There is no version for a Mac, Linux or a phone.
• It does not record anything. That is Easy Life Recorder, which is a separate program and makes the files this one edits.