Once you press Start, Snitt measures your footage on this Mac, sends up what the rough cut needs, and brings the result back down. This page covers what the project card is telling you and what to do when a job pauses.
What happens after Start
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Your Mac measures the footage
Snitt checks every file opens properly, reads any timecode the camera recorded, and syncs your external audio against the camera track. All of it happens on this Mac, because only this machine holds your media.
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The measurements go up
What the rough cut needs is uploaded. This part depends on your connection, and it is the first slice of the progress bar.
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The rough cut is worked out in the cloud
The transcript, the cuts, the suggestions and the self-check are worked out on Snitt's servers. This is where the time goes on a long project.
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The results come back
The rough cut downloads into the project. The card turns Ready; clicking it opens the review window.
Reading the project card
A running project shows a Processing badge and a progress bar. Clicking the card opens a small panel with the same bar and one sentence:
Snitt is working on this cut. You can close this and come back — it keeps running.
The bar is the only number. It never walks backwards, so where it sits is always the furthest the job has got.
You cannot open a project mid-run. Clicking a processing card shows the panel above.
You can keep working
Processing runs per project in the background. While one job runs you can browse your other projects, start a second one, add published videos to a profile, or close the window and come back. The job runs on the server; the app is watching it.
Signing out does not stop anything either. Jobs keep running, and they are there when you sign back in — the Account pane in Settings says so when you have one in flight.
When one clip has a problem
Trouble with a single clip does not kill the run. It is flagged and the rest of the project carries on, so you get a rough cut for everything that worked.
Structural problems are caught earlier than this, at import — see Starting a project.
Pause, never die
If something a job depends on keeps failing — a dead connection, an outage, an answer it cannot use — the job pauses instead of guessing.
A paused project shows a red Paused badge, a Resume button, and one sentence explaining what stopped. The sentence always ends the same way:
Resume picks the job up where it stopped: everything already done is kept.
Everything already finished keeps its result, and Resume asks only for the work that is missing. Press it whenever you like; there is no deadline.
Minutes
Your balance is in minutes, shown in the top bar and in Settings → Account.
Starting a job puts a hold on the minutes it could use. When the job finishes, you pay only for what it actually used, and the rest of the hold comes back. The number in the top bar is what you can spend right now; a job in flight has its hold counted separately, and Settings names it — N more are on hold for jobs that are still running.
The chip turns amber below 30 minutes. A job that never produced a cut never settles a charge.
If something goes wrong
The project went back to Draft with a note on it. The run ended without producing a cut. The note on the card says what stopped it. Nothing was charged, and pressing Start again is safe.
A job is paused and Resume pauses it again. The cause is usually still there — most often an outage on something Snitt depends on. Wait and press Resume again; the work already done is not spent twice.
The balance says “—”. Snitt could not reach the server to read it. The refresh button in Settings → Account asks again. An unknown balance is drawn as unknown, never as zero.
A job seems stuck for hours. Contact contact@snitt.ai with the project name. Jobs are visible from our side and a stuck one can be repaired without losing the work.