VideoCraft: A Free Online Video Editor with Keyframes, Chroma Key and Real Transitions

Key out a green screen. Animate a zoom on a bezier curve, frame by frame if you want. That used to mean desktop software, and VideoCraft is a free online video editor that does it in a browser tab, with nothing to install and no watermark on anything you make. Projects save, and the finished timeline exports to MP4 on your own machine, so a session is a real edit rather than a demo. Here's what's inside, and who it makes sense for today.

The layout will feel familiar if you've touched Premiere

Media bin on the left, Player in the middle, timeline below, and a right-hand panel that tabs between Clip Settings, Effects and Transitions. Every panel is dockable, and any of them can float as its own window. Drag a floating panel past the edge of the browser and it tears off into a real OS window you can park on a second monitor. That one surprised me the first time it worked.

You don't import media through a dialog unless you want to. Drag files from your desktop straight onto a timeline lane and they land as clips at the drop point; drop several at once and they lay out back to back. A video arrives as a video clip plus a linked audio clip that move and trim together (you can unlink them from the right-click menu). Audio decodes its waveform in the background, and still images land as 5-second clips you can stretch freely. The clips are even color coded: video is blue, audio is green, images are pink, so a busy timeline reads at a glance.

The timeline starts with two video and two audio tracks and grows to 16 of each. Ctrl+scroll zooms anchored on your cursor, all the way down to individual frames. S splits at the playhead, C switches to the razor, and Alt-dragging a clip peels off a full duplicate with its effects and keyframes intact.

Keyframes with a real graph editor

This is where most browser editors quietly give up, so it's worth being specific. Every Motion parameter (position, scale, rotation, anchor, crop), opacity, audio volume, and every numeric effect parameter can be animated. Each row in Clip Settings has a stopwatch to arm animation and a diamond to drop a keyframe at the playhead, which is exactly the Premiere behavior your hands already know.

The Show Keyframes button opens a floating Keyframe Editor with a property tree, diamond lanes, and a Graph Editor tab that plots value and velocity curves you can edit directly. Keyframes support seven interpolation types, including Hold for stepped moves, and every keyframe action gets its own undo step. To make the shot above I armed Scale, typed a second value four seconds later, and had a working animation in about fifteen seconds. Keyframes also ride with the clip through moves, trims and splits, which sounds obvious until you've used an editor where they don't. If keyframes are new to you, the beginner keyframe guide animates a lower-third step by step.

GPU effects, including a proper Ultra Key

Effects render through a chained WebGL pipeline on the GPU, not CSS filters. There are 14+ of them across blur, color correction, image control, stylize and keying categories, and you apply one by dragging its tile onto a clip or double-clicking with a clip selected.

The keying section is the headline. Ultra Key gives you matte generation, matte cleanup, spill suppression and color correction groups, plus Composite, Alpha and Color output views for debugging a stubborn matte. There's an eyedropper that samples the key color right off the Player. Defaults are sensible: Transparency starts at 45%, Highlight at 10%, Shadow and Tolerance at 50%.

Because the Player composites every video track at once, a keyed clip on V2 actually reveals the track under it, with per-clip opacity and blend modes in the mix. That's the piece that makes green screen useful rather than a demo: you can build a real composite, then screenshot the finished frame at full sequence resolution. Sequences go up to 4K from the presets, or any custom size to 8192px.

Transitions live on the cut

The Transitions panel ships 69 of them in seven groups: dissolves and fades, wipes, irises, slides and pushes, zoom and spin, warps like Warp Zoom and Warp Squeeze, and a whip-shake-and-glitch set with Whip Pan, Glitch and VHS. Drag one onto the cut between two clips and a fuchsia block appears on the clip edge showing its duration, which you can tune from 0.2 seconds up to half the clip's length in Clip Settings.

My actual advice: use them sparingly. Most edits want a plain cut, a cross dissolve says "time passed," and the shake transitions are for moments that earn them. For when to reach for each transition, see the post on video transitions. Two honest notes here: the outgoing side of a transition currently freezes on its last frame rather than keeping motion, and audio doesn't auto-crossfade at the cut yet, so pull a quick fade on the audio clips yourself with the corner fade handles.

What this free online video editor can't do yet

Three honest limits. Alpha-channel export is WebM only, because no browser-available codec carries transparency inside an MP4, so a keyed overlay can't come out as a transparent MP4. There's no dedicated color-grading page: you get color effects on clips, not a Resolve-style node graph with scopes and power windows. And on Safari and Firefox the fast frame-stepped encoder isn't available, so export falls back to a realtime capture that takes about as long as the video runs and caps at 30fps. Chrome and Edge get the fast path.

What works today, and works well:

• Timeline export. Render the whole sequence, or a marked in/out range, to MP4 (H.264 or HEVC), WebM VP9 or GIF. The encode happens on your own machine, so there's no upload, no render queue and no cap on how many times you export.
• Frame exports. The camera button grabs the full composited frame at sequence resolution as PNG, JPEG or WebP. For AI-video creators pulling clean stills, thumbnails or image-to-video source frames, this alone is worth a bookmark.
• The audio round-trip. Right-click an audio clip, choose Edit in Audio Editor, and it opens in SoundCraft (our free browser DAW) in a new tab. Fix the audio, hit send back, and the clip swaps in place on the video timeline without either tab reloading.
• Testing composites, keys and caption layouts before committing them in your desktop editor. The keyframe and keying engines are real, so timing you work out here transfers.

Everything in this post is on the $0 plan. Signing up is free, the editors stay free on every tier, and the paid plans sell storage and AI compute rather than editor features.

Small things I keep using

The timeline frame rate is its own setting (default 30 fps, with 24/25/50/60 available), so frame snapping matches your footage. Ctrl+E slices every track at the playhead in one stroke. Marquee-dragging on empty lane space rubber-bands a multi-selection, linked partners included. And the Motion section arms a transform gizmo right on the Player: drag corners to scale, drag outside a corner to rotate (Shift snaps to 15°), drag the anchor dot to move the pivot. That same gizmo is how you shrink a clip into a picture-in-picture inset. If you've prepped music for a video, the same right-click menu that opens SoundCraft also pairs well with our vocal extractor workflow when a soundtrack needs the vocal pulled out first.

If you're grading a feature or finishing a client deliverable to spec, keep your desktop editor. If you want to composite, key, animate and deliver AI-generated video from a browser tab, with muscle memory that transfers from Premiere, VideoCraft does the whole job now, and it costs nothing.