Launching Editly 2.0

We just shipped Editly 2.0, and I want to walk you through everything — what changed, why it changed, and where we are heading next. This is not a polished press release. It is an honest breakdown from the team that built it, including the parts we are still not satisfied with.

Six months ago, when we launched the first version of Editly, we had a clear thesis: creators should be able to edit videos by describing what they want instead of manually manipulating a timeline. That thesis has not changed. But our understanding of how people actually use the product — and where our initial approach fell short — has evolved dramatically based on thousands of editing sessions and hundreds of direct conversations with users.

Editly 2.0 is the result of those conversations. Every feature in this update exists because someone told us it was missing, or because we watched someone struggle with a workflow that should have been effortless.

What Shipped in Editly 2.0

Let me be specific about what is actually new, because vague feature announcements are frustrating and unhelpful.

Multi-Clip Projects

The most requested feature since launch, by a wide margin. Editly 1.0 handled single-clip editing — you uploaded one video, described your edits, and got a result. That worked well for simple social content but completely broke down for anyone trying to combine multiple clips into a cohesive piece.

Editly 2.0 supports multi-clip projects. Upload multiple video files, arrange them in a storyboard view, and describe edits that span across clips. You can say things like "use the first clip as the intro, cut to the product demo in clip two, and end with the testimonial from clip three" and the AI assembles it with appropriate transitions and pacing.

This was technically challenging to build. Single-clip editing is a constrained problem — the AI knows exactly what footage it has to work with. Multi-clip editing introduces combinatorial complexity: which parts of which clips to use, where to place transitions, how to handle audio continuity between clips with different recording conditions. We spent three months on the underlying architecture before we were confident the output quality was consistent enough to ship.

The implementation is not perfect yet. Projects with more than eight clips can be slow to process, and the AI occasionally struggles with audio continuity when clips have very different recording environments. We are actively working on both issues.

Smart Captions

Editly 1.0 had captions, but they were basic — auto-generated text overlaid on the video with limited styling options. The feedback was consistent: the captions looked generic, the positioning sometimes covered important visuals, and there was no way to customize the style to match your brand.

Smart Captions in 2.0 are a ground-up rebuild. The system now detects faces and important visual elements in the frame and positions captions to avoid them. You get twelve pre-built caption styles ranging from minimal subtitle looks to animated word-by-word highlighting in the TikTok style. You can customize colors, fonts, positioning, and animation to create a branded caption template that applies to all your videos.

The accuracy also improved significantly. We switched our underlying speech recognition model, and the word error rate dropped from approximately eight percent to under three percent for English-language content. For creators with niche terminology — fitness terms, cooking techniques, tech jargon — we added a custom dictionary feature. Add your commonly used words and the system learns to transcribe them correctly.

Template Library

Templates were the second most requested feature. Creators who use Editly regularly found themselves describing the same type of edit repeatedly — "add captions, cut the dead space, make it 9:16 for Reels" — and wanted a way to save that as a reusable template.

The template library lets you save any editing instruction set as a named template. Hit "Save as Template," give it a name like "Quick Reels Edit" or "Podcast Clip with Captions," and apply it to future uploads with one click. We also ship a library of community templates — editing workflows contributed by other Editly users that you can browse, preview, and apply.

Templates go beyond just saving instructions. They also save your caption style, export settings, and any consistent edits you make. If you always add a two-second fade-in and your brand watermark, that is part of the template. The goal is to reduce a five-minute editing interaction to a thirty-second one for content types you produce regularly.

Batch Processing

This feature came directly from conversations with content teams and agencies. They were using Editly for individual clips but needed to process five, ten, or twenty clips with the same editing treatment. Uploading and editing them one at a time was not scalable.

Batch processing lets you upload multiple files, apply a template or editing instruction to all of them simultaneously, and export the results. The system processes clips in parallel, so a batch of ten clips takes roughly the same time as two or three individual clips rather than ten times as long. You get a review screen showing all processed clips side by side before exporting, so you can approve, reject, or adjust individual clips within the batch.

For agencies producing high volumes of social content — repurposing webinar recordings, generating multiple ad variations, creating platform-specific versions of the same content — this is a major time saver. We have seen users process a week's worth of content in under an hour.

Improved Export Quality

We heard repeatedly that exports from Editly 1.0 looked slightly soft compared to the source footage, especially on high-resolution monitors. The issue was our encoding pipeline — we were compressing too aggressively to keep file sizes and processing times manageable.

In 2.0, we rebuilt the export pipeline with three quality tiers: Standard (fast processing, optimized file size for social platforms), High (slower processing, higher bitrate for YouTube and archival), and Maximum (uncompressed output for professional workflows). Most users will use Standard or High. The Maximum option exists for professional editors who want to bring Editly into a larger post-production workflow without quality loss.

We also added direct export to platform specifications. Select "TikTok" or "Instagram Reels" or "YouTube" and the export automatically uses the optimal resolution, bitrate, and codec settings for that platform. No more googling platform specs or worrying about whether your export settings are correct.

What Drove These Changes

I want to be transparent about the feedback that shaped this update, including the criticism.

The Multi-Clip Problem

Our initial assumption was that most Editly users would be editing single-clip content — talking head videos, vlogs, product demos. That assumption was partially right. About sixty percent of editing sessions are single-clip. But the other forty percent involve combining clips, and those users were forced to use other tools for assembly and Editly only for individual clip polishing. That workflow was clunky and defeated the purpose of fast, AI-driven editing.

Several users told us directly: "I love Editly for quick edits but I still need Premiere Pro for anything that involves more than one clip." That statement was the design brief for multi-clip projects. If someone needs to open another tool after using ours, we have not solved the problem completely.

The Caption Frustration

Caption quality was our most common support ticket topic. Users would generate captions, see a few errors, and not have a good way to correct them without re-generating and hoping for a better result. The lack of manual correction, combined with limited styling options, meant that creators who cared about caption quality (which is nearly all of them) could not fully trust the output.

The Smart Captions rebuild addresses this with both better accuracy and better correction tools. You can now edit any caption text inline, adjust timing with drag handles, and preview changes in real time. The goal is that caption generation gives you ninety-seven percent accuracy, and the inline editor gets you to one hundred percent in under a minute.

The "I Do This Every Day" Pattern

Power users showed us something we did not anticipate: they were using Editly with almost identical instructions every single day. A creator might produce a daily Instagram Reel and every single time they would type "add captions, remove silences, make it vertical, export at 1080." The repetition was a waste of their time and a clear signal that we needed templates.

Batch processing emerged from a similar pattern but at the team level. Agencies would have ten clips from a webinar and needed the same treatment applied to all of them. Doing it ten separate times was a dealbreaker for professional adoption.

What We Are Still Working On

Editly 2.0 is a significant step forward, but there are areas where we know the product needs improvement. Being honest about this matters more to us than pretending everything is perfect.

Processing Speed

Multi-clip projects with more than five clips can take several minutes to process. For a tool that promises fast editing, "several minutes" is too slow. We are working on infrastructure improvements that should cut processing times by forty to sixty percent by the end of Q2. The underlying issue is that multi-clip processing requires more compute than single-clip, and our current architecture does not parallelize this as efficiently as it could.

Language Support

Smart Captions currently work best in English. We support twelve additional languages, but the accuracy varies — Spanish and French are close to English accuracy, while languages with more complex phonetics or less training data have higher error rates. Expanding language support and accuracy is a priority for the second half of this year. We are particularly focused on Hindi, Portuguese, and Arabic, which are the most requested by our user base.

Advanced Editing Controls

Some users want more granular control over AI decisions. Currently, if you do not like how the AI paced a section or which transition it chose, your options are to regenerate with different instructions or accept the result. We are building a hybrid interface that lets you accept the AI edit as a starting point and then make manual adjustments to specific sections — adjusting a cut point by a few frames, swapping a transition, or tweaking the timing of a caption. This bridges the gap between fully AI-driven editing and the precise control of a traditional timeline.

Team Collaboration

Editly is currently a single-user tool. Multiple people can use the same account, but there is no built-in collaboration — no shared project libraries, no review and approval workflows, no role-based permissions. For agencies and content teams, this is a significant limitation. We are building team features that will ship in the next major update, including shared template libraries, a review workflow where editors can submit projects for approval, and team analytics showing output volume and processing usage.

The Roadmap: Where Editly Is Heading

I hesitate to share roadmaps because they create expectations that shifting priorities can make difficult to meet. But I think our users deserve transparency about our direction, with the caveat that timelines may shift.

Near Term (Next 3 Months)

1. Processing speed improvements for multi-clip projects — targeting a forty to sixty percent reduction.
2. Mobile companion app for reviewing and approving edits on the go. Not a full mobile editor, but a review interface.
3. API access for developers and agencies who want to integrate Editly into their existing content pipelines.
4. Expanded caption language support with priority on Hindi, Portuguese, and Arabic.

Medium Term (3-6 Months)

1. Team collaboration features — shared libraries, review workflows, permissions.
2. Hybrid editing interface combining AI edits with manual fine-tuning.
3. Content analytics integration — connect your social accounts and see which Editly-edited content performs best, informing future editing decisions.
4. Stock footage and music library integration for adding supplementary content without leaving the platform.

Long Term (6-12 Months)

1. Predictive editing — AI that learns your editing style over time and requires fewer instructions.
2. Live stream repurposing — connect a live stream source and automatically generate highlights and clips during or immediately after the stream.
3. Full localization — edit once and generate localized versions with translated captions and potentially AI-dubbed audio.

A Note on Pricing

Editly 2.0 does not change our pricing structure. All the features described above are available on the existing plans. Multi-clip projects, Smart Captions, templates, and batch processing are included in the Standard plan. We considered making batch processing a premium-only feature, and decided against it — it felt wrong to charge more for a feature that simply applies existing capabilities at scale.

We will likely introduce team-specific pricing when collaboration features launch, since team accounts have different infrastructure costs than individual accounts. We will share those details well in advance of the launch.

Thank You

Building Editly has been a constant process of learning what creators actually need versus what we assumed they needed. Every feature in 2.0 came from a real person experiencing a real limitation and taking the time to tell us about it. That feedback loop is the most valuable thing we have.

If you have been using Editly and something frustrates you, tell us. Our support inbox is read by the same people who decide what to build next. If you have not tried Editly yet and anything in this update sounds useful, give it a shot. The product is significantly better than it was six months ago, and six months from now it will be significantly better again.

We are not building the next Adobe Premiere. We are building the tool that makes video editing disappear — where the gap between having an idea and having a finished video is measured in minutes rather than hours. Editly 2.0 gets us meaningfully closer to that goal. There is still a long way to go, and we are moving as fast as we can.