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CoWork — Real-Time Video Collaboration Inside the Editor

Tomislav Brdjanović
Published date:

The standard collaboration workflow for video editors in 2026 looks like this: start a Zoom call, share your screen, toggle back and forth between the editor and the call window, paste clip names into Slack so your colleague knows which file you mean, re-share your screen after every window switch.

It works. It is also exhausting.

CoWork removes the external layer entirely. The video call is inside AVScript. Mouse sharing is inside AVScript. Clip synchronisation is inside AVScript. You stay in the editor.


Starting a CoWork session

The 📡 CoWork button appears in the toolbar only when the current project has an active sharing connection — either you shared the project with a collaborator, or someone shared their project with you.

Click the button. Your browser asks for camera and microphone permission — grant it. Both you and your collaborator connect to the same room automatically, because the room is tied to the project itself. There is nothing to copy, nothing to send, and no link to manage.

There are no accounts to create, no meeting IDs to manage, and no app to install on either side.


Expanded view

When your collaborator joins, CoWork opens in expanded view by default: a full-screen overlay with two large camera tiles side by side, controls along the bottom, and an option to collapse.

📡 CoWork — Connected
⊟ Collapse strip
TB
Tomislav (you)
You
MK
Mia Kovač

Press Esc or click ⊟ Collapse strip to reduce CoWork to the thin strip at the bottom of the editor without ending the call.


Collapsed strip

The collapsed strip runs along the bottom edge of the editor. Both camera tiles stay visible as small thumbnails. The controls — mic, camera, mouse sharing, clip sync — remain accessible. The editor above is fully usable: you can scrub, cut, mark in/out points, and type captions while the call continues.

Mia Kovač
CoWork
TB
You
MK
Mia Kovač
🎙
Mic
📷
Cam
🖱
Mouse
🔗
Sync
● Live
End Call

Incoming call notification

When someone initiates a CoWork session while you have the project open, a notification appears centred on screen — name, avatar, and two buttons: Accept and Dismiss.

A double-ring tone plays on your side while the notification is visible, repeating every few seconds until you respond or the caller hangs up.


Mic and camera toggles

The 🎙 Mic and 📷 Cam buttons mute your microphone or disable your camera feed independently. Your collaborator’s tile remains visible even if they mute their own mic — there is no visual confusion about who is connected.

Your own camera preview (the tile labelled You) is shown mirrored — the natural way to see yourself. Your collaborator receives the unmirrored feed; the flip is only cosmetic on your end.


Mouse sharing (🖱 Mouse)

Enable 🖱 Mouse to broadcast your cursor position to your collaborator’s screen. They see a green dot with your name on it that moves in real time, overlaid on top of their editor view — as shown in the mockup above.

The cursor position is transmitted as normalised viewport coordinates at approximately 20 frames per second and rendered with a short CSS transition to smooth out the updates. No screenshot data is sent — only two numbers per frame.

Use it to say “look at this clip” without interrupting your own playback or having to share your entire screen. Your collaborator can watch their own player while your green dot points at the exact clip row or timeline position you mean.

One-directional by default: Only the person who enabled 🖱 Mouse broadcasts their cursor. Your collaborator sees your green dot; you do not see theirs unless they also enable Mouse sharing on their side.


Clip Sync (🔗 Sync)

Enable 🔗 Sync to share clip list changes in real time. When you add a clip, delete a clip, reorder the list, or edit a caption, those changes appear on your collaborator’s screen within approximately 400 ms. They do not need to refresh the page or manually pull updates.

This is the division-of-labour mode: one editor works in the Media Bin and rough-cuts the interview down, while the other refines captions and adds b-roll from a second clip list panel — changes from both sides appear on both screens simultaneously.

Toggle Sync off during independent work: If both editors are building separate sections of the same project, turn off 🔗 Sync to avoid your changes overwriting theirs. Re-enable it when you want to merge your work and review together.


End Call

Click End Call to close the call. CoWork clears all WebRTC state and signaling records from the server immediately on hang-up.

The room is tied to the project — it is always available to the project’s owner and collaborator, and to nobody else.


Infrastructure

📡
Cloudflare Calls (WebRTC SFU)
Video and audio are carried over Cloudflare’s global WebRTC SFU network — 1,000 GB/month free tier included. No self-hosted media server required.
Supabase Realtime (signaling)
WebRTC session negotiation and Clip Sync events flow through Supabase Realtime channels. All signaling is proxied server-side — no credentials are exposed in the browser.

The combination of Cloudflare Calls and Supabase Realtime means CoWork has no single-server bottleneck, no cold-start latency, and no API keys in client-side JavaScript. Everything is proxied through the AVScript Cloudflare Worker.


Privacy

The CoWork room is scoped to a specific project and accessible only to the project’s owner and the collaborator they explicitly invited. No link is ever generated or shared. The signaling record is deleted from Supabase on hang-up, not on a timer. There is no call history or recording stored anywhere.

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