This week has a theme, and it is showing you things before they happen: the B-roll before it lands in your edit, the price before it comes out of your balance, the reason before something gives up. Plus cloud renders that run to a full hour, and a desktop app that shipped seven times in seven days.
Choose your B-roll from real, playable clips
B-roll used to be an act of faith. You asked for a shot, Eddie went away and found something, and the first time you saw what it had picked was when it was already sitting in your edit. If it was wrong, you asked again and hoped.
There is a panel now. Hit the ✨ on the B-roll lane, describe the shot you want, and you get back actual candidates — playable tiles, side by side, before a single frame is imported.
Stock, generated, or both — asked once. The old flow was genuinely two overlapping surfaces: a small composer popover asked you for source, shot, orientation and quality, and then the picker asked you for quality again before doing the work. Two buttons for one intention, and a source toggle that gated a stock search which should always have run. That is now one panel, one quality choice, one button. Stock always searches; generation appears when it is available to you.
Watch first, pick second. The candidates are clips you can play, not descriptions you have to imagine. This sounds small and is not: the difference between "a wide shot of a city at dusk" as a sentence and as a moving image is the difference between guessing and choosing.
Worth being honest about how this one came to be: the board shipped earlier as a tested component that nothing could feed it data. Search results reached the agent and never the page. Fixing that meant lifting the whole search orchestration out of the chat tool handler and into something a route could call — carefully, because copying it would have created two searches that drift apart, and one already-duplicated provider client is enough of a warning. The behaviour is unchanged; it simply became reachable.
It lands on the timeline. Chosen clips go into the edit where you can see them, not into a media bin you then have to go and find them in.
Adding B-roll → · Stock B-roll →
Cloud MP4 exports now run to a full hour
The cloud render limit has moved from 30 minutes to 60. A long-form interview, a webinar recording or a full episode now renders in the cloud instead of sending you back to a desktop machine to do it locally.
The interesting part is what had to hold underneath it. A render is assembled in chunks, and there is a ceiling on how many chunks one job may run. Doubling the permitted output length meant an ordinary hour-long edit would have sailed straight past that ceiling if nothing else changed — so the chunking maths moved with the cap rather than after it.
Eddie also tells you the limit before an export spends anything. If a cut is genuinely too long, you get told that it was refused for length, which is a thing you can act on, instead of a generic apology that tells you nothing.
The multicam grouping that gets exported is yours
If you grouped your cameras yourself, that grouping is now what travels into Final Cut, Premiere and Resolve. Previously an export could re-derive a grouping at export time and hand your NLE its own conclusion rather than yours — which is a strange thing to discover in the timeline, having already made the decision once.
Angles also land against the right clock now. A multicam angle carries an anchor time, and if the export measures that anchor against the wrong reference, every switched angle lands at a plausible-looking but wrong offset. That has been pinned, along with the sign convention for groups you build by hand.
And there is a quieter change that may matter more than either: when Eddie decides not to group your cameras, it now tells you. A declined grouping used to be silent, and silence is indistinguishable from success right up until you notice your multicam project is a single-camera edit. The same goes for a separate sound recording that never joined the cameras it was shot with — that is now a sentence you read at import, not a mystery you diagnose later. If a grouping did get damaged, there is a repair that can re-derive it, per project and opt-in.
Working with multicam angles → · Exporting to your NLE →
Know what a run costs before you pay for it
Paid work now states its price and your remaining balance before it starts, and accounts for it again when it stops.
The failure mode being closed here is specific and was genuinely bad: a run would begin on a balance that could not cover the whole job, do part of the work, and stop. You paid for a fraction of a result. Eddie now plans the cost up front, and if your balance will not cover what you asked for, it says so and declines rather than starting something it cannot finish. It will not begin a build on an exact-fit balance either, because an exact fit plus any surprise is a stranded edit.
A large multi-step change — the kind that can remove a lot at once — now gets a scope cap and a confirmation before it runs, rather than being discovered mid-execution.
And when a run produces nothing at all, you get your credits back automatically. That covers the run that hit a cap and wrote nothing, the run stopped by a content filter, and the run that ran out mid-way. The rule Eddie applies is judged on what was actually written, not on whether the machinery believed it had succeeded. Simply asking about your balance is free.
Imports you can rescue instead of restart
A file that fails now has a Retry button next to it. One click, that file only.
An import stuck on a last stubborn handful of files now offers to carry on without them. Nobody wants 195 good clips held hostage by five bad ones while a progress bar sits at 97%, and the previous options were to wait or to lose the batch.
Imports that stall part-way through now pick themselves back up rather than sitting there indefinitely — including work that was interrupted by something failing on our side, which is now re-queued instead of quietly abandoned. If a file genuinely cannot be read, you get the real reason: a clip too short to be usable says so, and a file with no readable video is now judged by what is actually inside it rather than by what its extension claims.
Eddie does what you asked, and admits what it did
Ask a question and you get an answer, not a surprise re-edit. If you say "no changes, just tell me", or ask for research without a build, that is now respected as an instruction rather than treated as a preamble. If Eddie offers you an either-or and you pick both, it takes both.
Eddie will not cut footage it has not actually looked at yet — a run is held until it has reviewed the material it is about to make decisions on.
The honesty work is the part worth dwelling on. When you ask for all 197 clips and a run delivers twelve, it now tells you it delivered twelve. That number comes from the record of what was really written, not from the model's own account of what it did — a model summarising its own work is an unreliable narrator, and the fix is to read the ledger instead of asking. The same applies to a montage that used ten of two hundred B-roll clips, and to coverage counts on long edits. If a run saved several edits, it names all of them.
Seven desktop releases in seven days
The desktop app went out every day this week.
Drag a Final Cut XML export straight into Final Cut Pro — out of Eddie, into the app, no intermediate save.
Resolve imports reuse the proxies you already have. If your Resolve project already has attached proxies, the import uses them instead of rendering its own from scratch, which takes a large chunk of time out of large imports. Big Resolve imports also no longer time out waiting on a proxy render that was progressing perfectly well.
More formats land properly. iPhone video with spatial audio imports correctly, HEIC photos import, and multicam angles that span several camera files arrive as one switchable angle rather than as fragments.
Fewer opaque failures. Tiny accidental clips — the half-second ones from a fumbled record button — are skipped rather than failing the batch around them. A Premiere export that fails now says it failed instead of reporting success. Titles wrap to the width they actually have, so line breaks match what you designed. And updates install and restart cleanly, with a clear message when one does not.
Your projects list shows dates and recent activity, so finding the thing you were working on yesterday takes one look.
The desktop app → · Opening projects on the desktop →
A simpler view, one tap from the full one
Eddie now has two ways to work: Chat and Pro, and switching between them is one click, always in the same spot on every screen — the leading edge of the header, right by the logo.
Chat keeps things to what most edits actually need: the timeline, the Prompt Eddie rail, Share, and a single gold Download MP4 button, with a small icon beside it that opens the full export menu when you want it. Pro puts everything back — every view mode, comments, the activity feed, Backgrounders, B-roll review, version history. The two views read the same underlying edit; nothing about your project changes when you switch, only how much of the bench is visible.
The default is Chat, and it stays that way the first time you open Eddie — the same call ChatGPT makes with its own simple-vs-full-workspace switch. The first time you flip to Pro on a given device, that choice sticks there. It is a per-device preference, not a project setting, so a shared link opens in whatever mode the viewer last chose for themselves.
Also this week
- Landscape footage on a vertical canvas is cover-cropped to fill the frame instead of being squeezed into it.
- The voice-over picker shows each voice's gender and character, and regenerating narration never discards the take you already had.
- On-screen titles are never quietly shortened — the player and the exported MP4 now wrap text by exactly the same rules.
- A new project's share link is an explicit decision you make, and a link you have closed stops serving the project rather than half-loading it.
- One notification feed for your whole account, so a finished export or a new comment does not have to be hunted down project by project.
Missed last week?
The headlines from the week before, in case this is the first one you have read.
- Eddie is in the App Store — the same projects you left on your desktop, on your iPhone. Review, ask for changes, export and invite from the phone.
- Eddie won a Cine Gear Expo Technical Award for Post-Production Technology, the only winner in that category.
- Every microphone on its own track — separate mic channels survive the hand-off to your NLE, on multicams too, so you mix from real stems.
- Captions that match your preview word for word, with your own words-per-card setting — and a mute you set once stays muted in the player, the MP4 and every export.
As always, just tell Eddie what you want and it will do it.
— The Eddie AI team