HOW TO — 3 / 6
The AI's first draft arrives nearly finished. Your job is to open it and fix whatever bothers you. There are three ways: drag to move, mark it and hand it to the AI, and ask in words. All of them take effect on the spot.
1 — The screen map
When you open the app, the screen is split into four main places. Whether you're just looking or fixing things, knowing these four keeps you from getting lost.
About the words on screen — The on-screen wording gets new names in the next release. In the v1.5.0 app you will see Motion parts shown as “Overlay”, My styles as “My presets”, Caption styles as “Caption template”, and Channel settings as “Brand kit”.
| Place | What's there |
|---|---|
| Left | The edge column (Projects / Library / Skills / Export / Channels / Settings) and the project panel (three bands from the top: Assets, Records and Exports). The Library is here too |
| Middle (top) | The preview. Play it to check how it turns out. The marking tools are on the second row of the playback bar |
| Right | Four tabs. Inspector (values and knobs for the selected item), Chat (talk to your AI partner), Script, and Annotations (notes on your marks, and “Hand to AI”). It remembers the tab you used last |
| Bottom | The timeline. Video, captions and audio line up in time order. The top row is the Script row |
Every place reads the same save data (edit.json), so a fix made anywhere always matches everywhere else.
2 — Left: Assets and the Library
Assets shows what you've brought into this project as cards. The funnel menu narrows them to All / Video / Image / Audio / Placeholders and so on. Records holds plans, edit data and reports. Exports is the export band; drag its top edge to change its height.
The Library is the shelf of things you drop onto the timeline. There is one shelf, holding Assets, Styles and Templates. Items are sorted by what they are (text and decoration / Caption styles / motion / effects / 3D and avatars / illustrations / Motion parts / My styles / Templates and so on), and you narrow by type with the funnel.
In the v1.5.0 app, “Motion parts” shows as “Overlay” and “My styles” as “My presets”, and tiles for “scaffolds” and “sets” also appear. The new names arrive in the next release (→ Troubleshooting).
If you connect your Lab account (akari store connect), you can also use Lab's free assets and the ones you've obtained.
3 — Middle and right: preview and annotations
Grab a caption or element in the preview and put it where you like. It snaps near the center and edges (hold ⌥ while dragging to turn that off for a moment). You can change the stacking order by dragging, too.
The “adjustable values” of whatever you select appear automatically in the right-hand Inspector as sliders and color pickers (the knobs). A caption's look is in the Caption style section on the right. Movement in position and size can be added with keyframes.
The second row of the playback bar holds the pen, pin and range tools, plus attachments. Mark a spot you care about and write a note, and it stays as an annotation in the right panel. Lines you draw straight onto the preview are kept too. A pin you've placed can be dragged, and you can keep the note's small window open while you play and seek.
Press “Hand to AI”, on one annotation or on several at once, and it reaches your partner. In Claude Code or Codex in a terminal it goes into the input box as text; for a partner it can't write to, it copies the text and tells you to paste it. For a pen stroke, the request spells out “from where to where”.
For fixes that affect the structure, asking the AI is faster:
4 — Bottom: the timeline
5 — Drop in a template and swap only the footage
Drag from the “Templates” shelf in the Library onto the timeline and it's placed as one bundle. Its audio, captions, motion and length are already decided, and only the video frames are empty.
A bundle you made yourself can be exported as a template with akari playbook template (from the next release, akari template export; akari playbook template stays as an alias).
6 — The Script panel and caption looks
7 — Long works: Scenes / Structure / Relations
For a long work, you can split one project into scenes. Each scene has its own timeline and assets for one video's worth. The scene list page has the following three tabs.
| Tab | What you can see |
|---|---|
| Scenes | The list of scenes. Add one with “+ Add scene” |
| Structure | A tree of project → scene → cut. Shows lengths and how many placeholders there are |
| Relations | How assets, styles, people and documents connect, as a diagram |
When you open a scene, the top bar becomes “Channel › Project › Scene ▾”, and ▾ jumps to other scenes. Assets used across the whole project are listed with a “Shared” mark. If anything is missing or out of date, a bar such as “1 missing · 1 not fetched” appears at the top of the screen. From the command line, use akari project scene add.
8 — Where your fixes are kept
Whether you drag, adjust with a knob, or ask the AI, it all goes to the same place: the project's edit.json (the source of truth for the edit). So:
The preview and the finished video are built to match. What you checked in the preview comes out the same in the exported MP4, because both use the same assets and the same rendering rules.
If you work from the terminal, a simple preview that opens in your browser is also available (akari.sh --preview, then http://localhost:4567). Do fine editing in the app.