Being able to reliably monitor and adjust audio in professional multi-media creative tools is a delicate art, so creating audio meters to assist creative professionals was vital to reliably turning a professional’s creative intent into a balanced and dynamic sound mix.

Throughout the process of “dogfooding” our own app sequence.film on real video projects, we started to feel the pains of not having this. Device volume vs. media volume compete against each other IRL and meters are really the only way to ensure what you’re mixing measures the way you intend.

We decided to tackle it as an early 2025 project because it seemed simple at first glance. How complex could a colored bar animated to a sound signal be?

Like all projects we take on at sequence, it’s never as simple as we expected.

Meter? I hardly know’er!

Those simple colored bars are actually fascinating translators, turning invisible sound waves into beautiful visual information that creates a reliable standard for mixing and playing audio worldwide.

The origin of Audio Meters, like so much of the technology around us today, originates from Bell Labs. Through a partnership with CBS & NBC to try to create accurate and inexpensive equipment to help the widely expanding radio communications networks standardize their signals, they created the VU meter in 1939.

The types of meters you see across professional video and audio software today have evolved quite a bit from those analog VU meters, but the functionality and general information remains, attempting to convey three crucial insights:

1. They warn us when things are getting dangerous - like a speedometer creeping into red. In digital audio, we call this point “0 dBFS” - it’s where sound starts to break apart into distortion. The meters flash red, telling us to back off before the damage is done.

2. Then there’s the way they show us averages - how loud things feel over time rather than just sharp peaks. Analog VU meters do this naturally, with their weighted movement causing them to gently sway like grass in the wind. Digital meters need a bit more juice to help out.

3. Finally, they help us hit specific target audio levels. Streaming services, broadcasters, film festivals - they all have their own requirements for how loud audio should be. Good meters help us nail these standards in the authoring process rather than just clamping everything later on.

The decades between the creation of those initial meters and today has resulted in those core concepts being refined to create many different metering methods and interfaces, each optimized for specific needs:

• Peak meters that catch the highest points in your audio with near-instantaneous response

• VU (Volume Unit) meters that approximate how humans perceive loudness

• PPM (Peak Programme Meters) that balance between peak accuracy and usability

• Loudness meters that measure integrated loudness over time

• True peak meters that detect intersample peaks through oversampling

…and that’s just talking about the “meters” pattern of visualizing audio!

Each type reveal different aspects of the audio signal. A good peak meter might show when you’re about to clip, while a VU meter is said to be better for balancing relative levels between tracks. Understanding these distinctions was crucial for building meters that would be genuinely useful for video editors.

Audio Metering Foundations for Video

For our audio meters, we want to work in dBFS (decibels relative to full scale) where 0 dBFS represents the maximum loudest possible digital signal level, and we are tracking measurements down to the quietest on a logarithmic decibel measurement.

This allows us to effectively translate a simple digital signal into known and agreed upon levels which are human-readable for people everywhere to share as their mixing targets:

• Dialogue typically sits around -12 dBFS to -15 dBFS, with peaks not exceeding -10 dBFS

• Music usually floats between -18 dBFS to -14 dBFS (depending on whether it's background music or featured music)

• Sound effects range from -20 dBFS for ambient sounds up to -10 dBFS for impact moments

• Room tone / background ambience hovers around -30 dBFS to -40 dBFS

• The overall mix peaks around -6 dBFS, giving that crucial headroom before clipping at 0 dBFS

• Trailers and promos often push louder, peaking around -4 dBFS

• Feature films typically maintain wider dynamic rage, with quiet scenes dipping to -50 dBFS or lower

Of course, these aren’t rigid rules. Every project has its own sonic landscape, and the goal is for the meters to behave in a way that allows you to easily think about and mix these levels intuitively.

This is why professional audio meters can’t just be about animating the size of a line in accordance with the audio signal: the UI needs to translate the sound waves with more intention. Luckily over the decades, standards have been developed here too in forms of unique UI/animation concepts these meters ought to support, such as “meter ballistics” (awesome name), to make meters work well for humans:

• Attack time: how quickly the meter responds to volume increases (faster for peaks, slower for averages)

• Release/decay: how quickly it falls back down (usually more gradual than attack)

• Peak hold: those little lines that hang on to the highest peak level for a duration of time so you get a chance to actually read the level

• Color zones: green feels safe, yellow makes us cautious, red screams danger

• Averaging windows: different spans of time to match how our ears perceive sustained sound (300ms became the sweet spot for VU meters)

• Logarithmic scaling: because our ears work exponentially, not linearly

• Ballistic curves: the way the meter smoothly accelerates and decelerates, almost like it has mass

• Needle damping: in analog meters, the actual physical resistance to prevent bouncing (now simulated digitally)

Designing in Code

After this rabbit hole of research, I felt a lot more confident we could create some genuinely useful audio meters for video professionals. But it also became clear the traditional “design & handoff” process wouldn’t work for this.

In order to try to understand the problem space better and get a feel for how these meters reacted with real audio, I found myself prototyping and designing the meters in code it via AI. Well, 3 times, if we’re splitting hairs.

Prototype A - Meter Madness

The first prototype was meant just for myself, and was built in a side-project codebase I use for prototyping ideas using a similar technology stack to what we use at Sequence. Working with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet-3.5 and Cursor Composer over the course of a (very late) evening, I created a simple app that utilized the Web Audio API and its AnalyserNode to give us real-time frequency and time-domain data.

From there, I could experiment with different style treatments, settings, and test audio files to get a sense of what we wanted to do for our app.

Prototype B - Polish & Refine

While Cursor Composer is great with the type of app logic to explore technical ideas, it’s not so great with frontend exploration. For that, Vercel v0 really seems to stand out from the AI code-gen crew. So I gave the relevant parts of my initial prototype to v0 and spent a couple of hours refining the main components we were concerned with.

Working in this way, it took a few hours to get a style I was pleased with, integrate proper synchronization between the Mini Meters and the Full Meters, add responsive resizing, and even allow the meters to respond to different multichannel audio layouts. And I can even deploy + share a link directly with our team. Great work, v0!

Only catch is that v0 primarily works with Next.js, so now we have React components… (we LOVE Svelte here at sequence)

Prototype C - Once More…. in ✨Svelte🥰

Finally, feeling satisfied with the state of the prototype, I once more took the code back to Cursor Composer and re-translated it to support Sequence’s Svelte 4 + Typescript tech stack and our “Montage Design System”

From Canvas to (Post-)Production

Typically designers hand off a set of “screens” or “specs” to developers to implement features once we’ve finished designing them. At their core, these are just descriptive graphic documents, which developers still have to *write in code*.

This process of designing the actual audio meters via interactive code left me with no specs to hand off, simply the actual code (with all the complexities of interpreting a digital audio signal into dBFS and accurately animating them along with our custom ballistic and level settings) and a set of recommendations for how it should live in the app. From there, our CEO Luke picked it up and was able to integrate it into our media pipeline and polish up the interactions in just 2 days.

While we could have implemented the meters using DOM elements, we chose Canvas for rendering (just as we chose to do for our Timeline panel). This gave us precise control over the visualization while maintaining excellent performance. The basic rendering loop looks something like this:

1. Get current audio data from the AnalyserNode

2. Apply smoothing based on ballistic settings

3. Convert linear amplitude values to logarithmic dB scale

4. Draw meter bars with appropriate colors for warning/clip zones

5. Update peak markers and hold indicators

6. Schedule next frame

Small differences to timing, smoothing, or visual feedback could dramatically change how the meters felt to use. These coded prototypes using the canvas were the straightest path to ensure my design intent matched what ended up shipping in production.

Lessons for Designing Creative Tools

Through this process, we learned several key principles to take on as we continue designing the best tool for video professionals possible:

1. Balance precision & usability: While we could display exact dB values to multiple decimal places updating as fast as we can read the signal, good meters communicate information more subtly to keep you in the flow. By choosing a sample window and selectively choosing to show peak values instead of amplitude in the label readouts, we can make this less visually jarring.

2. Respect industry standards: Audio professionals have developed certain expectations about how meters should behave. Breaking these conventions without good reason only creates cognitive friction.

3. Design for different contexts & states: Editors need different information when recording, mixing, or doing final output. Good meters adapt to these contexts, and even consider the brightness and color of what they show during playback vs. not in playback.

4. Consider performance implications: Audio metering needs to be responsive without impacting playback or or editing performance. Canvas rendering and efficient data handling were crucial for achieving this.

It’s Showtime, Baby 🎟️

The final implementation in Sequence achieves several key goals:

• Accurate peak and RMS level display

• Smooth, natural-feeling response to audio changes

• Clear visual feedback for warning and clip states

• Professional-grade precision while maintaining usability

But perhaps most importantly, building these meters taught us valuable lessons about the intersection of technical precision and user experience. It’s not enough for tools to be technically accurate - they need to feel right, becoming a natural extension of the creative process. And, perhaps, we need to adapt the ways we build things to support that.

Tools and workflows for video production are currently built around a single player, desktop modality. Many post production facilities operated entirely on prem—until COVID-19.

Other industries have already migrated to collaborative, cloud based systems, where teams can effortless flow between applications and functions. Why hasn't video production?

Internally, tech + video giants like Netflix & Amazon have been building applications that wrap around the planning & management aspects of production, but creative tooling still lives alone on the desktop. (See Netflix tech blog: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflixs-production-technology-voltron-ab0e091d232d )

Planning & management app primitives can only take teams so far without being integrated with creative app primitives. This is where a new paradigm, the Editorial Operating System, comes in. It abstracts away operational complexity of running both production and creative tooling.

Pixar developed a version of this process, called "Edi-storial"—Since their films are CGI, they already building blocks (think storage, compute, and the timeline) in place to link together the different filmmaking processes through an editorial hub in a story driven way.

What we propose is extending this hub model to be a full fledged operating system with reusable components that abstract operational complexity of production tooling across hardware and software. Creative and production applications run on top.

• Collaboration and access control primitives enable these apps to scale across teams.

• Application primitives allow apps to interface with the story and library data models.

• Cloud-based storage and compute primitives abstract away physical hardware.

• Public APIs allow for 3rd party apps/plugins/integrations to extend the system.

Beyond this, AI agents can play a role alongside human collaborators, but need the infrastructure to access these tools.

Sequence's first product is this cloud-based editorial operating system.

The user applications today include a production management workspace, a media asset library manager, and a non-linear editor.

Our goal is to provide the platform that enables the next Pixar, or even more ambitiously, to be the next Pixar.

This studio of the future is half artists, half technologists, but 100% story driven. We think it will look a little like this:

Creating audio + visuals is getting easier. Our phone cameras are incredible, and the pace of generative video is disruptive. The tool you use to capture your story is up to the you, but an editorial OS can enable your process to scale to the limits of your team's imagination.

The Traditional “Waterfall” Production Workflow Is Inefficient

Imagine the typical pre-production to production to post-production process we’ve come to know well throughout the last century of motion pictures. Sure, there are things that have updated here and there over the years, but at a high level it’s remained unchanged from this process:

1. Try to build out a vision and communicate it to other people with static documents like scripts and storyboards

2. Hand that off to an army of people to capture it into data

3. Dump the data into editorial and let them sift through it to pull out the best version of the story

While this has proven to be a viable process to make movies, it is wildly inefficient. Treating all the members of production (except for a select few) as boxed-in cogs in a machine leads to a struggle to see the whole picture of a project at any given time. Even worse, none of the standard pre-production methods are ever representative of what you’re actually working towards: a motion picture where sound and image play out over time.

A “Production Hub” Unites Siloed Pieces and People of the Production Process

The first step to solving this is throwing away the notion that because someone has a particular specialty, their work needs to happen in isolation. In an ultra-connected world, there’s no reason why information regarding a project can’t be united under a single digital umbrella, with specialty interfaces to address the needs of particular roles and workflows.

Okay cool, so we can centralize everything into some cloud database. We’ve just made cloud storage branded for creatives, big whoop.

Wanna know a secret? A timeline in any video app is just a database. Well, maybe not JUST a database, there’s the whole actually working with the media part. But in terms of data, all video apps are doing is looking at a giant database of media files, and saving a set of instructions for how to piece those files together, then showing you a representation of that graphically in the timeline. A timeline is a database.

When you start to imagine the timeline as a database whose content is populated by anyone involved in a project, the scope of what belongs in a timeline becomes a lot more interesting. Why do we wait to put things into a timeline until the third stage of production, instead of from the beginning?

Editorial is the Shared Source of Truth

When Pixar began creating the first animated feature film “Toy Story” (1995), there was a question by many about what exactly the editor would do. After all, editors working in live action had always been seen as the people who took hundreds of hours of raw footage and trimmed it down. Surely with Pixar using CGI to make exactly the shots they wanted, the role of editorial would be minimized.

However the ability to make any shot of the imagination happen easier than before didn’t suddenly mean filmmakers were faced with less material to cut down, it meant they were faced with every possible option ever to sort through. As such, it became the role of the editor to shape and test these million decisions before fully committing to animating them.

For Pixar, the script itself is useful and storyboard panels are interesting enough, but the true star of the show is the timeline. This process, which came to be known at Pixar as the “edi-storial” process, moved the editorial teams from the end of production to the center of production, and turned the timeline into a living scratch pad for everyone to bring their ideas to.

This type of environment is difficult to replicate outside of computer animated films though, and it’s about time we did something about that.

New from the studio

Fresh from our new digs in Downtown Long Beach, we're dropping our latest passion project: "guys we need to post a video" out now on the Sequence YouTube Channel.

This bad boy represents the most technically ambitious in-app edit in Sequence to date, and we can't wait to keep pushing the boundaries of the product with our own videos.

Introducing: Workspaces

We created Sequence not just to be another NLE, but to be the production hub for your entire team. With Team Workspaces, that production hub becomes more defined. Now, everyone in a team workspace can keep track of the status of all the projects, dive into the the latest work from a project, manage settings, and more — all without needing to open up the timeline.

Introducing: Chroma Key and Blend Modes

Our CTO Brian just wrapped on a killer trilogy: Chroma Keying, Cropping, and Blend Modes are now in the can! No more roundtripping to other apps when you need to pull a clean key or stack some sweet overlays.

Timeline Improvements

We're constantly working to make the timeline as comfortable and easy to use for editors of all skill levels. Now you can navigate your timeline by jumping between edit points with up/down arrow keys, watch your timeline back at different speeds with JKL key playback, select clips using the WASD keys, and use multi-select and copy/paste across the editor!

Work-in-Progress: AI Video Search

While everyone's been going crazy over AI, we're taking the Christopher Nolan approach — practical effects first, but with some mind-bending tech where it counts.

We aren't focused on "generative ai" at this time, we've built an AI/ML reasoning layer across Sequence projects that can analyze all your media to form content intelligence + understanding — allowing you to search, reference, and interpret media across your project conversationally.

While these are still the early days of internal testing, we're really excited about the new dimension of malleability this adds to media for professionals and novices alike.

---

That's all for now! Talk to you soon and see you in the timeline :)

Cheers,

~ The Cast & Crew of Sequence ~

Introducing Titles in Sequence

We recently released a huge new feature allowing you to finally create basic titles and graphics right within Sequence. We even made a cool teaser trailer using them and this vlog speaking with the developer of titles, Adam:

Clip Anchors & Multi-select Progress

All summer, Hunter has been working on the building blocks to add multi-select operations and copy & paste to the timeline. We've already shipped improvements to visualizing clip attachments, and are following up fast with support for multi-selection in the timeline.

From here, we'll start to tackle other common features like marquee selection, drag to duplicate, and cut/copy/paste!

Keyboard Navigation in the Timeline

We've been slowly adding more keyboard-driven functionality to the timeline all summer. Now, in addition to scrolling the timeline and navigating the playhead between edit points, we're introducing Clip Traversal using the WASD keys. Check out some cool things you can do with it!

Coming Soon...

Another project we've been working on all summer isn't a part of the editor at all... It's called Workspaces, and it's the collaborative hub that will unite all your work in Sequence.

Workspaces allow you and your team members to have access to all the same projects, which can quickly be seen at a glance in various views like the progress tracking kanban board view above.

From there, all the collaborators on a workspace can use the project overview to keep track of the latest screenings & exports, manage the project media, and more. We're super excited to finish implementing the first version of workspaces to share with you!

More from the Studio

In an effort to embody Building-in-Public and better hold ourselves accountable to progress, we've decided to start sharing more videos on our YouTube that we make internally at Sequence. So if you're craving more Sequence content, seeing how we use the app ourselves, or seeing how we're thinking about the user experience of Sequence, check out our "Behind-the-Timeline" playlist on YouTube.

That's a wrap for this month's update, we hope to see you in the timeline soon!

Cheers,

~ The Cast & Crew of Sequence ~

Collaborative video editing. When you read those words it probably isn’t 100% clear what exactly that means. Whether you’re someone who comes from a professional video background or are a hobbyist creator, the thought of ‘collaborative video editing’ could either scare you or have you questioning why this isn’t a more widely used approach to editing.

Earlier this year, Sequence hired me as an Editor Advocate to give collaborative video editing a try, first-hand. Sequence is a startup building tools to make collaboration in the video production process easier. As an Editor Advocate, my role is to see how we can tell more of our company story through dogfooding our own product. On top of this, I get to speak with video editors, studios, production teams, and more to understand the filmmaking and video community and ensure we’re building tools with creatives in mind.

To date, I’ve made a handful of videos for Sequence using our own NLE. Now that it’s been a few months of familiarizing myself with the tool and this new approach to collaborative video editing (which, internally we call “The Sequence Method”), I wanted to share what our workflow looks like behind the scenes.

What is Collaborative Video Editing?

For a long time, we’ve referred to Sequence as “Google Docs but for video editing” or “Figma for video editing” which you could imagine, means having the ability for multiple people to edit in one video timeline. Although this is the core concept of what Sequence is building from a product perspective, in practice it actually means much more than just being able to hop into the same timeline as another person.

The reality is that video editing workflows are extremely hard to change. People have tools that they’ve spent years learning and have become second nature to use. This is where switching to a collaborative video editing tool starts to sound high-friction— not only are you changing someone’s tool but also the way they’re used to working.

What I’ve started to learn through creating more videos in Sequence is that collaborative video editing isn’t just about being able to edit in real-time with other people. It’s about involving others in different parts of the storytelling process from idea and pre-production to filming and post-production.

For this article, I’ll be using one of our most recent videos called “Why we haven’t launched yet” to walkthrough how we approach collaborative video editing.

Ideation & Concept Generation

In my role, I currently spearhead most of our video efforts. This means coming up with video ideas, running them by the team, & kicking off the project. When it comes to generating video ideas or concepts, anyone on the team can bring forth new ideas but which ones we prioritize and choose to pursue are usually determined in a weekly meeting we call “Storytime”. Storytime is a time where myself, Luke, Parker, & Jacob discuss current and upcoming videos as well as brainstorm new ideas.

Scripts & Storyboards

Once the team feels good about a video concept, I’ll usually go ahead and start drafting a rough structure for the video. In the context of the “Why We Haven’t Launched” video, this entailed mapping out a rough intro scene, points we wanted to convey in the main body of the video, followed by an outro. For that video, this was the structure of the story:

• Intro

• Acknowledge the question: Why Sequence hasn’t launched

• Reason #1: Perfectionism

• Reason #2: Technical Complexity

• Where we’re going from here

• Concluding remarks

• Outro

For most of our recent videos, we seldom use a set script and rather keep in mind a core theme or message to leave room for serendipity. Truthfully, our pre-production process is something we’re still defining and evolving with each video but the use of A/V scripts will likely become more prominent in our workflow.

Filming

As a team of startup employees with a love for film, we don’t have the fanciest set up right now for filming. For the “Why We Haven’t Launched Video” we used Parker’s apartment and two of our own cameras to film.

For the camera nerds out there we used a BlackMagic camera & a Fujifilm XS20 shooting in 24fps with some iPhone clips.

Since we knew roughly what points we wanted to cover in the video as mentioned in the structure above, we were able to film each part as a different scene. Since we didn’t have a set script, we took additional takes for coverage to see what we could string together in post-production.

Editing

This is the part many of you are likely most curious about. When it comes down to the actual editing of our videos we try to do most of the work directly in Sequence.

File organization

Since we filmed the video on two different cameras, to get the files in one central place and start editing them we start by creating a Sequence project and inviting anyone on the team who is involved with the project. From there, I was able to upload clips from my camera while Parker was able to upload the clips from his camera. Will all the clips now in one library, I could go ahead and start cutting up the footage.

Syncing Footage

As you might have seen in the final video, we switch a lot between Cam A and Cam B footage (two different angles with synced audio). To sync up the files, I created a new timeline where I dropped in all of the footage, scene by scene, and manually lined up the Cam B footage on a track above the main timeline containing the Cam A footage. This was done through a mix of listening by ear and looking at the audio wave forms.

Rough Cut

Once all of the footage is synced, I duplicate the timeline to start making cuts of each talking segment to pull the story together while removing filler. Up until now, we can see that the editing itself has been a fairly solo process but this is where the magic starts to kick in.

Once I have my first pass of a rough cut, I can start to get feedback from the team right away. Instead of exporting the video and throwing it in Slack or some other tool for review, I can send a link of my timeline to my team and have them leave comments directly on the timeline itself.

Feedback & Review

The main advantage I’ve experience so far with having a collaborative video editing workflow is the ability to have a faster, more precise feedback and review process. As I continued to cut and refine the project, it was really convenient being able to have the team comment on how the flow of the video was looking and what areas might need additional trimming. Commenting directly on the timeline was a huge unlock since it meant that I didn’t need to disrupt my editing flow in order to receive feedback.

The rounds of feedback we had for this video were as follows:

• Structural → giving feedback specifically on the structure and flow of the talking portion of the video

• Rough cut → giving feedback on the intro, body, and outro of the video

• Rough cut V2 → giving feedback on the color grade, overlays/transitions, and sound

For the final cut of the video, I created a Screening Link that the team could use to watch the final version of the video. This is always fun because Screening Links almost feel like having your own little internal premiere.

I’ll be honest, having someone look at my timeline in the early stages of video editing used to intimidate me a lot but the more I create videos in Sequence, the more I start to appreciate getting feedback early and often. Each time we create a new video the process of editing and getting feedback seems to get faster and easier than the last one.

Reflections

Our process for bringing multiple collaborators into a video project is ever-changing and improving but so far, we’ve seen a lot of growth as a team of storytellers. Here are some of my honest reflections on the experience so far:

The Upside of Collaborative Video Editing

• Easier file sharing: Allowing your team members to upload files directly to a project that you can start editing off of has saved me a lot of time from having to download all of the files myself then import them into my video editor.

• Better feedback loops: This felt easier in two regards: the first was through removing the need for me to export a rough cut, upload it to another tool for review, then go make the changes in my original timeline. The second was through making it easier to draw a connection between the feedback and a specific point in the timeline. Since my teammates were able to leave feedback on specific clips or time ranges in my timeline, I could see the comments where they were relevant and then resolve them once I made the changes.

• Making quick changes: I think we’ve all been in those cases where maybe 1-2 extra seconds needs to be shaved off a video or one small tweak needs to be made to a video but making that change requires the original editor to go back in and apply the feedback. Having a shared timeline means anyone in the project has the ability to duplicate your timeline and apply those quick edits on their own.

The Limitations of Collaborative Video Editing in Sequence

• With great power comes great responsibility: Giving access to your timeline does require a lot of trust within your team. There can be cases where someone accidentally moves something around in your timeline or makes new edits without telling you. This can be an issue when there is poor communication within a team but as long as changes are communicated and boundaries are respected, this doesn’t have to be an issue.

• Feature-richness: As an early stage startup, Sequence as an NLE still lacks more advanced color, audio, and effects. This means that some additional edits may need to be done in other tools at times which can break up the workflow a bit more.

• Organizing feedback: You might’ve heard of the saying “too many cooks in the kitchen”, it can be easy for this to become the case in a collaborative environment. At Sequence, we try to give the video lead the power to make the final call when it comes to adapting feedback.

Overall, collaborative video editing is something that will only become more and more mainstream with time. Currently, there are still a handful of points of friction in the process but to be able to craft a creative workflow at Sequence that is built on trust and collaboration has been something truly unique to see.

If you’re curious about Sequence or want to give it a try in your workflow, shoot us an email at team@sequence.film!

For the past two years the team at Sequence has been working hard to bring the best collaborative video editing tool to life. The thing about this grand vision of ours is that it turns out, building a professional cloud-based video editing tool is really, really tough.

In last month's newsletter we touched on why we haven't launched yet and what we need to do to get there. Since there was a lot more we could speak to on this topic, we decided to make a full video on it. In case you missed it, you can watch it here.

Throughout the month of May our focus has been on how we can start to bring Sequence into the hands of more users. The main difference in the way we've been thinking about things this month is that we've placed a heavier focus on enabling more use cases for early users in Sequence.

In other words, is there opportunity in the short term to make collaboratively video editing easier with what features we already have built out?

Building out a world-class, multiplayer editing tool takes time but there are smaller pieces of that vision that we can start to make an impact with.

Product Updates

🚀 An improved export experience

This month we've begun revamping the export settings modal within Sequence to provide you with more flexibility when it comes to exporting videos. Choose from an export preset or specify your codec, quality, resolution, and frame rate preferences!

🔔 More comprehensive notifications

We've improved notifications in Sequence starting with a more organized view for email notifications. With these updated notifications, you can easily see who left a comment on what timeline and click the comment to navigate to the respective timeline. In-app notifications are also coming soon!

🔓 Public access for screenings

Screening links for feedback and review can now be shared publicly. Previously, Screening links could only be shared among those invited to your original project. With public screenings, anyone can view your Screening.

📥 Full screen drop zone

Sequence now has a full screen drop zone! This means that you can now drop files and assets anywhere in Sequence, not just within the Uploads tab.

🪄 Improved A/V sync

After weeks of internal testing Sequence now has improved A/V sync! Trimming clips more precisely and syncing audio is now easier than ever with this new update.

Movies We're Obsessed With

We don't just want to make movies, we love watching them too 👀. Our team has a Slack channel called #movies, here's a roundup of some of the films we've been raving over:

• ​Challengers (2024) - the team got front row seats to watch Challengers in theatres at the beginning of May 🎾

• ​Anatomy of a Fall (2023) - A crime/thrillermovie directed by Justine Triet that Chethan watched

• ​The Fall Guy (2024) - An action-comedy about a stuntman that Luke coins as his movie of the summer

• ​I Saw the TV Glow (2024) - A film following two troubled friends whose favourite TV show got cancelled

• ​Moscow on the Hudson (1984) - A mix of comedy, romance, and drama, this movie is about a Russian saxophonist visiting New York City

Where We're Headed

As we enter into June, the team is continuing to focus on bringing Sequence into the hands of more users. We're hoping to finish building out some exciting new features so that anyone who wants to use Sequence for file management, collaborative video editing, or feedback and review can do so even easier than before.

That's a wrap for this month's update, we hope to see you in the timeline soon!

Cheers,

Mylene & the cast & crew @ Sequence

Alright, let's get this straight. We know that for the past few months we've been pretty vocal about the new features we've been building & quite frankly, it's been unfair to all of you. You all have been so supportive on our journey so far, yet we haven't let you know when you can expect to start using Sequence.

The truth is, our team has been trying to build the best cloud-based collaborative video editing tool for the past 2 years. We've made a ton of progress but compared to the grand vision we have for the future, things still feel far away.

This feeling tied with a sense of perfectionism creates a clash between wanting to get all of you on the platform now & fearing that the experience isn't up to par just yet. But the thing about startups is that there seldom is a perfect time or a perfect product. If we wait until things feel perfect, it might be too late.

A Path to Public Access

We're still navigating what exactly public access means and the implications of such but roughly speaking, here is what we need to accomplish to make this happen before the end of this year:

Improved stability: as covered in last month's newsletter, stability is a top priority for us in ensuring you have a smooth editing experience

Reliability: aside from stability, ensuring that we are building features that can act as building blocks for future improvements is important as we grow

Managing storage usage: as we onboard more users onto the platform, we're still learning about how much storage the average Sequence user may need & how to cater to different storage needs.

Battle-testing: Battle-testing features to see how they perform plays an important role in anything we release. Through more extensive use and testing, we're able to ensure a things are working as intended. As of right now, we're making a handful of changes to the media asset library to ensure we can continue building on top of it with minimal issues in the future.

Improved metrics: As we scale our user base having better metrics is imperative as it will provide us with key insights into what's working vs. what is not working in Sequence. These metrics will eventually become a strong pulse in what improvements we make to the platform.

We're working hard to get these things done so that anyone can easily sign-up and experience the magic of collaborative video editing but in the meantime, if you are someone who...

• is a huge fan of the idea of collaborative video editing

• loves testing out early tech

• is willing to work through the the inevitable early stage bugs & crashes

• will make time to provide meaningful feedback to our team

• & is open to completing at least one end-to-end video in Sequence

...reply to this email & we'd love to see how we can get you set-up with an early access trial to test out Sequence.

Aside from getting more users onto the platform for early access, we're also playing around with a few fun ideas on other ways we can start to engage the community of Sequence early supporters 💛

Product Updates

👀 Screenings is officially launched

We've finally fully launched Screenings in Sequence! Screenings enables faster feedback loops during your editing workflow. Consider it like a 'comment-only' link you share on Google Docs for review but instead, for video!

🗂️ Nested folders for improved organization

Organizing your library clips just got easier with new nested folders. Simply right click a folder and select 'New Nested Folder'!

🔎 Inspector panel v.2.0 is finally launched

We teased it in our last newsletter but the newest iteration of the inspector panel is now live in production, offering a decluttered interface for editors.

🏃 Faster project boot-up

After hearing feedback from some of our early users, we've improved how long it takes for your project to fully load up in Sequence. During the hours of 5am - 5pm PST users will experience the fastest project boot-up times.

🧽 Improved playback and scrubbing

We've pushed some improvements to Sequence that will make playback more reliable and scrubbing through your timeline or media, smoother.

🏁 New checkerboard background

A small quality of life upgrade we made to the playback viewer is adding a checkerboard background. This makes it easier to see what in the window is actually part of your video.

From The Studio

At Sequence, we don't make typical feature release videos. Instead, we make product trailers. Product trailers are our way of telling the story behind what a feature is, why we built it, and how to use it!

LUTs product trailer

Hear from our CTO of Video Systems, Brian Williams & Founding Designer, Parker Gibbons as they discuss Sequence's first step towards color management.

Watch now

Screenings product trailer

Product Engineer, Jacob Elias discusses Screenings. Screenings is a new feature integrated directly into the Sequence NLE to enable faster feedback loops.

Watch now

Movies We're Obsessed With

We don't just want to make movies, we love watching them too 👀. Our team has a Slack channel called #movies, here's a roundup of some of the films we've been raving over:

• ​Fast and Furious - Luke binge-watched the Fast and Furious movies after watching a Christopher Nolan interview where he mentioned Fast and Furious as one of his favourites

• ​Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) - Luke wasn't the only Fast and Furious fan this month, Jacob also went back in time to watch this classic

• ​Shogun - not a movie but a mini series Brian, Parker, & Luke have been loving

• ​Civil War (2024) - Brian's favourite dystopian film of the month, written and directed by Alex Garland

• ​The Iron Claw (2023) - a movie following the story of brothers as they make history in the highly competitive world of professional wrestling in the early 1980s

• ​American Fiction (2023) - based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett

• ​The Northman (2022) - a movie directed by Robert Eggers on conquering your fate.

• ​Videodrome (1983) - a movie about a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment

Where We're Headed

As we enter into May, the team is continuing to focus on stability while also digging deeper into improved notifications and the introduction of Titles in Sequence. We're also upping our own storytelling game through working on new video concepts that we can't wait to share with all of you!

That's a wrap for this month's update, we hope to see you in the timeline soon!

Cheers,

Mylene & the cast & crew @ Sequence

When Things Get Ugly

Earlier this month our team found ourselves in the trenches, working through regressions and technical debt. It's usually not fun when things like this happen, but, as I like to say: "it adds to the plot".

For a few weeks, the platform felt difficult to use. Video playback was freezing up and cutting up clips was buggy.

Although frustrating, these challenges helped our team sharpen our approach to product development. We've since adopted a higher standard of testing practices as well as faster product cycles to ensure we're shipping early and often.

Just as how any good movie has it's fair share of plot twists and conflicts, the same is true with startups.

The Silver Lining

The number one takeaway from March was that as we build this tool, nothing is more important than stability.

Stability is what takes a video from an assortment of random clips to a story.

Stability is what allows teams to experience that "wow" moment when they watch the final cut.

Stability is what keeps the platform going with you during those late night editing sessions.

Fancy features are flashy, but having a stable platform is foundational for everything else. This is something our team has grown passionate about not just through building Sequence but also through our team's experience using existing editor tools in the past.

Everyone hates crashes and we're working hard to make Sequence the most stable video editing tool out there.

It's not going to be easy. It's going to take time. But your support as we build this has been a push forward for us to continue doing our best to make it happen.

Product Updates

✨ The inspector panel just got better

We've revamped the inspector panel to make working with clips more organized:

✂️ Trimming tooltips

When trimming clips in the timeline, editors can now see a tooltip above the trim handle that displays the amount of time being added or removed as well as the total clip length.

👀 Link importer is coming soon

By popular demand, we've been working on a way for editors in Sequence to import clips into their library via a YouTube link!

📋 Copy & paste is coming soon

For a while, copy & paste was an urban legend in Sequence but as of last week we now have a working prototype! The challenge with copy & paste is the need to preserve the exact alignment and settings of each clip that is selected and copied. This gets complicated especially as you introduce different layers and effects.

From The Studio

As a team that makes tools for storytellers, it would be a shame if we didn't tell some of our own! Check out some of our videos:

🎬 we spent a week building our startup on a haunted ship

🎬 if sequence were a movie, this is what it would be​

🎬 the most important story we can tell as a company

Movies We're Obsessed With

We don't just want to make movies, we love watching them too 👀. Our team has a Slack channel called #movies, here's a roundup of some of the films we've been raving over:

• ​Dune 2 (2024) - this was a must-watch for the team, it even prompted Luke to re-read the book and Dune Messiah

• ​Godzilla Minus One (2023) - a movie that Adam claims was better than Dune 2 and all the movies he's seen in the past year

• ​Gattaca (1997) - a sci-fi/thriller that caught Miriam's eye through it's captivating use of color

• ​Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) - a rom-com directed by Rachel Lambert

• ​Side by Side (2012) - a documentary on the history of digital and photochemical film creation

• ​You Hurt My Feelings (2023) - a movie that Brian thinks anyone who likes a good character-driven dramedy should watch (but don't watch the trailer, it spoils the movie)

& if you're still craving more, Parker put together a list of tech-y movies that people on Twitter have been raving over.

Where We're Headed

As we enter into Q2 we're joined by two new cast members at Sequence: Jacob & Chethan 🎉 The team is continuing to grow alongside the platform and we're excited to start onboarding more early users soon.

To us, early users are those who are so excited about the idea of collaborative editing, they're willing to work through the occasional bugs and crashes to provide feedback that will help shape our product.

After last month's newsletter we got a large volume of responses from people interested in using Sequence. If you haven't yet heard back from someone on the team, you should be receiving an email follow-up sometime next week.

It's been a chaotic month for the team but every hurdle was necessary to bring us to a place now where the tool runs better than ever.

That's a wrap for this month's update, we hope to see you in the timeline soon!

Cheers,

Mylene & the cast & crew @ Sequence

Sequence Takes Long Beach

Earlier this month our team met up for five days in Long Beach, CA for our third Sequencers Retreat. As a team that is currently fully remote, these retreats are one of our traditions as a way for us to jam in-person & geek out over what we want to build next together.

Unlike the retreats I & II, this retreat consisted of a cast of now *6* characters, a big milestone coming from the one-man show in 2021 back when Sequence was a mere idea in Luke's head. We shot lots of film, all while co-working out of a historical haunted ship. Similar to the the previous retreats, this one happened to fall on the same dates as the stormy Pineapple Express, contributing to our streak of experiencing poor weather during get togethers.

Some things we're most excited about post-retreat:

• Our next big production release

• Editing & sharing with you some of the content we filmed during the trip

• Getting our Kodak Super 8 film roll developed

• Getting our first few users into the Sequence timeline

• Our new team headshots taken by our in-house Polaroid-fanatics, Luke & Parker

Peaks & Valleys: The Startup Rollercoaster

As one might expect, building a startup is hard but building collaborative cloud-based video editing software is even harder. As fun as our retreat was, during that time we also uncovered a handful of bugs & regressions in our platform. Resolving these issues slowed the team down in the short term but were necessary as we move forward.

After weeks of grinding & cycling through new bugs & new fixes, Sequence is now at a state that is even better than before.

Recent Bug Fixes:

• Improved: playhead scrubber getting stuck when starting playback

• Fixed: potential crashes when switching between timelines & library items

• Fixed: audio adjustments not applying consistently to clips

• Fixed: unable to connect to video preview stream in Safari

Building With Intention

February was a good reminder to our team that when it comes to building the best collaborative video editor, you must first start with building a great video editor. Fancy new features are cool and all but nothing beats having a reliable, smooth experience in the timeline— a solid foundation to build even better capabilities on top of.

Our approach to building has always placed a heavy emphasis on the editor experience & this is something we continually strive to focus on as we build this tool.

From The Studio

As a team that makes tools for storytellers, here are some new videos from the Sequence Studio:

🎬 A Funky Sequence Retreat Montage

🎬 Parker's take on our philosophy for building at Sequence​

​

Movies We're Obsessed With

We don't just want to make movies, we love watching them too 👀. Our team has a Slack channel called #movies, here's a roundup of some of the films we've been raving over:

• ​Perfect Days - a 2023 film by Wim Wenders about a janitor living in Japan

• ​Tenet (but the 70mm IMAX re-release in particular)

• ​All of Us Strangers - a 2023 film rated 5 stars by Parker

• ​One Day - not a movie but a series that made Mylene want to ugly cry

• ​After Hours - a film directed by Martin Scoresese in 1985

• ​Gravity - Parker watched this on the moon in his new Apple Vision Pro

Join Us in The Timeline: Sequence Early Access

During the latter half of February, the team spent the month onboarding new users onto the platform. As we continue into Q1, we're looking to get a few more projects & teams onto Sequence to provide feedback & act as design partners as we continue to build.

If you have an upcoming video project that you'd like to try editing in Sequence solo or with your team, shoot us a reply to this email & a member of our team will reach out to see how we can get you started in Sequence!

Aaaand that's a wrap! If you're just as excited to see collaborative video editing become a mainstream thing as we are, stick around for more monthly updates to come.

—

Cheers,
Mylene & the cast & crew @ Sequence

A Quick Recap

Over the past year we've grown a ton, shipping new features every week, growing our team to a small but mighty 6 people & geeking out over the latest & greatest films.

Building a cloud-based video editing tool is no easy task but this year we're not just going to be heads down building anymore.

This newsletter is the start of our journey of creating and building in public. We're giving you a front row seat to see how we're crafting the future of video editing and how you can get inspired too.

You can expect updates on our story, new features, learnings, and more each month!

Product Updates

✨ She scrolls. She zooms. She's a scroooom bar.

We've added a new scroom bar in the timeline, allowing you to easily scroll or zoom in and out of the timeline:

🎨 Color filters are coming soon!

Sequence is about to get even more colorful as we roll out support for advanced color transformations using Look Up Tables (LUTs)

Soon editors will have the ability to try out 7 different transform LUTs, 14 creative LUTs, or bring your own LUTs.

📺 Screenings

In a few weeks, Sequence will allow you to send out screening links similar to Frame.io or Vimeo to get feedback on rough cuts, color graded clips, final drafts, & more. We're excited to share more details about this in next month's newsletter!

From the Studio

As a team that makes tools for storytellers, it would be a shame if we didn't tell some of our own! Check out some of our videos:

🎬 We don't do marketing, we tell stories

🎬 Retro video tech ads that go hard part 1​

🎬 Timecode is (kindof) a result of the military-industrial complex​

Our team is also making a Q&A video soon where we'll be answering questions from you! If you have a question about what we're building, who we are, or what our favourite fruits are, reply directly to this email ✨

Where We're Headed

This year is a big year for Sequence. It's the year we'll be bringing on our first end-to-end pilot projects & it's the year our team will open up our first office in Long Beach, CA. It's been a long time coming but we're cutting the radio silence to give you more visibility into what and why we do what we do here at Sequence.

Aaaand that's a wrap! If you're just as excited to see collaborative video editing become a mainstream thing as we are, stick around for more monthly updates to come.

—

Cheers,
Mylene & the rest of the cast + crew @ Sequence

Key Features:

• Configurable codec selection through properties

• Built-in signalling protocol with optional custom implementation

• Dynamic bitrate adjustment based on network congestion

• Packet loss mitigation through retransmission and Forward Error Correction (FEC)

• Real-time statistics monitoring and visualization

The element requires the latest GStreamer main branch and will be included in the upcoming 1.20 release.

Development roadmap:

• Rust-based signalling server

• Additional congestion control algorithms

• flexfec implementation

• Comprehensive integration testing

Special thanks to Mathieu Duponchelle for the initial implementation! View the source here: https://github.com/centricular/webrtcsink