Known Editor Limitations
CE.SDK runs entirely on clients and makes use of hardware acceleration provided within that environment. Therefore, the user’s hardware always acts as an upper bound of what’s achievable.
The editor's performance scales with scene complexity. We generally found scenes with up to 200 blocks well usable, but complex blocks like auto-sizing text or high-resolution image fills may affect performance negatively. This is always constrained by the processing power available on the user's device, so for low-end devices, the experience may suffer earlier. Therefore, it’s generally desirable to keep scenes only as complex as needed.
Editing Limitations#
Although the editor can manage a collection of pages with varying dimensions, our interfaces are presently designed to maintain a consistent dimension across all pages. Consequently, loading scenes with pages of different dimensions may lead to unexpected behavior, and the editor might adjust your scene accordingly.
Video#
Our video feature offers client-side video playback and export by utilizing the latest frameworks and APIs on the target platforms. The following limitations apply, details can be found below.
| Feature | Limitation |
|---|---|
Feature Video | Limitation H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC in an mp4 video file |
Feature Audio | Limitation MP3 in an mp4 video or mp3 file and AAC in an mp4 video or m4a file |
Feature Resolution | Limitation Up to 4K UHD for both playback and export, directly depending on the client hardware |
Feature Length | Limitation Stories and reels of up to two minutes, recommended maximum duration of ten minutes |
Codecs
We’re currently focusing on the most popular codecs, which are widely used and well supported across platforms. This translates to the following:
Video
H.264/AVCin an mp4 video fileH.265/HEVCin an mp4 video file (additional requirements may apply per platform)
Audio
MP3in an mp4 video or as a standalone mp3 fileAACin an mp4 video or in a standalone m4a container file
Resolution
- We test and support videos up to a 4K / UHD resolution for both playback and export. As our processing capabilities directly depend on the client's hardware, we generally recommend modern hardware for 4K footage. This especially applies to high-quality footage such as high frame rates (60FPS and more) or full color profiles.
- 1080p videos at 30 FPS can generally be handled by most hardware released in the last ten years, especially due to the wide availability of hardware acceleration for H.264 in CPUs & GPUs.
Length
We support all typical Story and Reel Video lengths of up to 2 minutes.
Longer videos are also supported, but we generally found a maximum duration of 10 minutes a good balance for a smooth editing experience and pleasant export duration of around one minute on current hardware.
Hardware Limitations
Each device has a limited amount of high performance hardware decoders and encoders. If the maximum number is reached it will fall back to (slow) software de- and encoding. Therefore users may encounter slow export performance when trying to export in parallel with other software that utilizes encoders and decoders, e.g. Zoom, Teams or video content in other tabs / apps. This, unfortunately, is a limitation of hardware, operating system and browser and cannot be solved.
Platforms#
As all processing is happening on the client, CE.SDK has some specific platform requirements depending on the desired feature set. See details for the following platforms below:
Web#
On the web, CE.SDK makes use of certain browser features. A detailed list of supported browser versions can be found in our "Supported Browsers" documentation.
Recommended Hardware#
| Platform | Hardware |
|---|---|
Platform Desktop | Hardware A notebook or desktop released in the last 7 years and at least 4GB of memory. |
Platform Mobile (Apple) | Hardware iPhone 8, iPad (6th gen) or newer |
Platform Mobile (Android) | Hardware Phones & tablets released in the last 4 years |
Video#
Our video feature introduces additional requirements and we generally distinguish playback (decoding) and export (encoding) capabilities. On the web, certain browser features directly depend on the host operating system. For video, this currently introduces the following limitations:
- Transparency in H.265 videos is not supported on Windows hosts.
- Chrome on Linux generally doesn’t ship with encoder support for H.264 & AAC, which can cause video exports to fail even though decoding of non-free codecs is supported.
- Chromium although technically the base of Chrome doesn’t include any codecs for licensing reasons and therefore can’t be used for video editing. It does fall back to system-provided media libraries on e.g. macOS, but support is not guaranteed in any way.
- Video is not supported on mobile browsers on any platform due to technical limitations which result in performance issues.
Node.js#
Node.js is CE.SDKs headless offering and targeted towards use in automation and backends. All processing is CPU-based and comes with the following requirements:
- Node.js 18 or later
The reliance on CPU processing may yield lower export speeds when compared to web browsers.
Recommended Hardware#
No specific CPU requirements, but export time scales with processing power and we recommend at least 2GB of memory.
Video#
Video is not supported in Node.js.
Apple (iOS, macOS, Catalyst)#
On Apple platforms, CE.SDK makes use of system-frameworks to benefit from hardware acceleration and platform native performance. The following targets are supported:
- iOS & iPadOS 14 or later
- macOS 12 or later
Recommended Hardware#
- iPhone 8 or later
- iPad (6th gen) or later
- Macs released in the last 7 years
Video#
Playback and exporting is supported for all codecs mentioned in the general section.
However, mobile devices have stricter limits around the number of parallel encoders and decoders compared to fully fledged desktop machines. This means, that very large scenes with more than 10 videos shown in parallel may fail to play all videos at the same time and can’t be exported.
Android#
On Android, CE.SDK makes use of system-frameworks to benefit from hardware acceleration and platform native performance. The following targets are supported:
- Android 7 or later (
minSdk 24)
Recommended Hardware#
Android phones released in the last 5 years, e.g. Asus Zenfone 3, Samsung M31s, or Google Pixel 5. Video capabilities directly depend on the video capabilities of the individual phone.
Video#
Playback and exporting is supported for all codecs mentioned in the general section.
However, mobile devices have stricter limits around the number of parallel encoders and decoders compared to fully fledged desktop machines. This means, that very large scenes with more than 10 videos shown in parallel may fail to play all videos at the same time.
Export Limitations#
The export size is limited by the hardware capabilities of the device, e.g., due to the maximum texture size that can be allocated. The maximum possible export size can be queried via API, see export guide.