What we’re building

We can’t tell you too much yet, but I do want to give you a sense of what we’ve built, are building, and what we are aspiring to create with Scenery.

The Foundation

At the core, our aim is simply to create the best possible tool for making video content, on your own or with a team.

Ground breaking products often feel contradictory, they stretch old definitions and create new ones. Scenery aims to be:

• A professional grade video editor, but in your browser.
• More approachable than existing video tools, yet in many ways more capable.
• Fast and easy for simple edits, but also organically scalable to complex projects.
• Supports real time, collaborative workflows across large teams, but feels natural to use alone for a quick one-off edit.

So that’s our foundation: a fast, reliable and always connected video editing experience that gets the details right. On that foundation what we’re building is a response to accelerating trends in media, work, and technology.

Media

Media, the idea of it, its form and function, how we consume it, and its role in our lives has always been evolving. From Charlie Chaplin to Charli D’amelio, we’ve seen dramatic changes in what content means to people, its length, its narrative structure, and how and when we consume it. The velocity of content consumption, and therefore production, is increasing dramatically year over year, and the needs of people who produce that content is changing in lockstep.

Work

The nature of work in general is also changing. We now work more remotely and at the same time more collaboratively. Real time collaboration is now the baseline for productivity tools in every vertical.

The ubiquity of these tools and our increasing comfort and ability to leverage them has profoundly changed how we work. These days it seems no blog post is written in isolation (including this one). No spreadsheet filled out by one person, no product conceived by one designer. Once you create as a team, there is no going back.

Technology

Technological advances tend to build quietly and slowly over decades, during which they feel like a toy, making unnoticeable iterative improvements every year, only to spill over suddenly to become foundational once they’ve reached a certain maturity.

We think we’re only at the cusp of this inflection point with machine learning, and any power tool built today needs to be built with ML in its DNA, not as an after-thought.

At the base of it all, browser and computing advancements and ubiquitous bandwidth make building on the web an advantage, not a hindrance.

What we can accomplish today is qualitatively different than what was possible with Jumpcut in 2005. We’re able to fulfill our original vision, that unfinished business –­ an online video editor that rivals desktop tools with few, if any compromises.