Saving a project

Ctrl+S saves. Ctrl+Shift+S saves under a new name. Both are also buttons on the top bar.

What is in a project file

Everything you decided: the clips and their order, the trims and splits, every zoom, every overlay, the captions, the background, the canvas shape, the camera settings, the audio levels.

Two formats, and the one to choose

Save as offers both.

.cilevi is a description and nothing else. Every recording, every companion file, every picture is named by where it sits on this machine. It is small, it saves instantly, and it is the right file to keep in the same folder as your footage.

.cilevipkg is that same description with every file it names copied inside it. One file is the whole project.

Use the package when you are sending the project to somebody, putting it on a memory stick, or keeping it after you have tidied your Videos folder. Use the plain project the rest of the time.

A plain project whose media has moved opens with empty clips and no way to tell what used to be there. That is the failure a package exists to prevent, and it is worth the size.

Opening a package

Opening a .cilevipkg unpacks its media into a folder of its own and works on those copies. From there on everything behaves like an ordinary project, and saving packs whatever the project names then, so anything you add afterwards goes in with it.

Opening one

Open on the top bar, or double click the project file in Explorer. Cilevi registers itself for both of its file types, so a double click opens the Studio with the project loaded.

Being asked to save

Closing the Studio with unsaved changes asks first. An export saves first, without asking, every time.

Starting over

New gives you an empty project. Open Video makes a project from any video file you already have, whether Cilevi recorded it or not.