Ponder is an AI video editor. You drop in a pile of raw footage, tell it what the cut should feel like, and it comes back with an assembled timeline you can take into Premiere or Resolve.
I was mainly on the desktop app, aka the actual editor you sit in. Timeline, playback, canvas, chat. If a control in that window does what you expect, I probably wrote it.
The Editor
Most of the shipped work lived in the timeline and the agent around it. Sequence switching. Locking clips while something is generating. Keyboard, zoom, playback that doesn't go blank, chat that doesn't die when you mention four assets in one sentence.
I made the timeline fast, the waveforms stable, the playback smooth, the media pool being able to handle a real ingest. Timeline history, agent autozoom, the agent-to-local-state bridge so the model could see client state, chat performance, error recovery, and a lot of layout and UI work.
The Canvas
Then I built the organizer canvas. Infinite board for the footage and all it takes to organize it. The shape of the canvas was React, but the entirety of the rest of it is painted: cards, frames, little timeline primitives, the grid, the minimap. Everything here is owned by the <canvas />. The camera lives in its own store so panning and zooming don't kick off a React render.
Uncapped it was ready to draw at 3000+ FPS on a real project with 1000+ clips. Hover a card and it plays, trim it - and it trims. Drag a group onto a timeline block on the board and apply that into the sequence. Undo the board without touching sequence undo. LOD when you zoom out. I'm not saying this was the fastest node canvas implementation on the planet, but neither am I saying definitively that it was not.
R&D
I also went off the shipped path. How a machine should look at footage. Was the shot locked off? Was the operator breathing? What did the camera knew about where it was in the room? Is the take technically dead even if there's a face in it? Do these clips belong together when nobody named the files? What does “this take is better” even mean if you weren't on set?
