> I understand the limitations mentioned for reencoding, which are perhaps likewise applicable to other software vendors also. It does limit usage though, in my opinion. It may be fast with GPUs, but the difference on my high end machine is still of an order of magnitude if reencoding is avoided.

Interesting, I'm actually curious of some numbers. This probably makes sense for insanely simple editing, but very likely if you do any edit, you'll always need to reencode (since you do some processing).

> Typical video software has it like a build process. So there are these project files maintaining the list of all resources, edits performed, settings, etc. Editing a Word document needs none of it. For many casual edits, it would be great to just open a video file, make edits (e.g., rotate the video, remove some segments, increase brightness, etc.) and click save (which overwrites the original file), and all done. There's no "project", no auto-save, etc.

Interesting, I do understand the allegory, but I'm not sure this is such a good idea. Just imagine this - you put some text on top of your video. In 5 minutes you want to move the text a bit lower. Bam, you wouldn't be able to do that.