Projects, the library and your files

A project is a folder

A Cask Film project is a .caskproj package: a folder that macOS shows as a single file. Inside it are the project itself, a small listing sidecar, and an assets folder holding copies of every file the project uses.

That means a project is self-contained. Move it, copy it to another drive, or hand it to someone else, and the media goes with it.

When you create a project, Cask Film asks where to put it and remembers that folder for next time. The first time, it suggests your Movies folder.

Importing copies, it does not link

Importing media into a project copies the file into the project’s assets folder. Deleting or moving the original afterwards does not break the project.

The cost is disk space. A project that imports 4 GB of footage is a 4 GB project.

The library is shared across projects

The library is separate from any project. It lives in your Application Support folder and holds reusable material: files you imported, cards you saved off a canvas, generated output, text snippets, and the preset media that ships with the app.

Preset items cannot be deleted. Everything else can.

Anything you add to the library is copied into it, for the same reason project imports are copied. Placing a library item into a project then copies it again into that project’s package, so the two are independent from that point on.

Cloud sync is per project

Cloud sync is a choice you make on one project at a time, with Move to Cloud…. There is no account-wide switch that syncs everything.

A cloud project uploads in the background. Editing and export carry on while the first upload runs, and stopping the upload leaves the project exactly as it is on this Mac. Remove from Cloud… detaches it again.

Your storage use is the total across your cloud projects, measured against your plan’s limit. When you pass it, sync stops and reports being over quota rather than silently dropping work.

The edit lease keeps two Macs from fighting

A cloud project can be open on more than one Mac. Only one of them can edit it.

The Mac that is editing holds the project’s edit lease. On any other Mac the project opens read-only, with a banner reading Read-only and naming the machine that has it. Playback, inspection and export all still work. Only changes are refused.

To take over, click Take Back Editing. The other Mac flips to read-only, and it does so cleanly: before it gives up the lease it writes its pending changes to disk and pushes them to the server. Work in progress on the other Mac is not lost.

That has three consequences:

If a Mac loses the lease while you are mid-edit, your last edits are already saved locally, whatever the network did.
If the network drops so badly that the lease cannot be reached, taking it back fails and the project stays read-only.
An agent driving Cask Film hits the same wall. Every write tool refuses on a read-only project, and says so.