Match-Cut's SVG animation capabilities
Most editing tools treat vector graphics as a guest on the timeline — something you drop in as a flattened image and hope it doesn't need to change again. Match-Cut treats SVG as a native layer type, with the same timeline, the same keyframes, and the same export path as everything else you're cutting. Here's what that actually means in practice.
Paths stay paths, start to finish
Import an SVG — a logo, an icon set, a hand-drawn shape — and it comes in as real, editable path data, not a rasterized image sitting on top of your footage. Every anchor point stays an anchor point. That matters more than it sounds: it means a path can be keyframed, not just repositioned, and it means the file you export at the end can still be opened and adjusted, the same way the one you imported could.
What you can actually keyframe
Once an SVG is on the timeline, it behaves like any other layer, with a few things specific to vector work:
- Standard transforms — position, scale, rotation, and opacity, keyframed against the same timeline your footage is cut on.
- Stroke animation — animate a path's stroke so it draws itself on, a common move for logo reveals and line-art icons.
- Path morphing — keyframe one shape into another directly, rather than cross-dissolving between two separate layers.
- Nested groups — keep a multi-part graphic organized as a group and animate the group as a whole, or reach into it and animate one piece independently.
The part that's actually different: it's on the same timeline as your footage
This is the piece most tools don't do. In a comp-based tool, vector work and video usually live in separate compositions that get combined afterward. In Match-Cut, a shape layer and a video clip sit on adjacent tracks of the same timeline, so you can keyframe a logo reveal directly against the frame of footage it's covering — nudge the cut, and the animation you built against it moves with it, because they were never two separate projects to begin with.
A concrete version of this: a title card built from vector shapes, animating in over the first few frames of a shot, timed to land exactly as the footage settles. Building that in two tools means rendering the footage, dropping it into the vector tool as a reference, animating against a flattened preview, and re-exporting if the cut changes. Building it in Match-Cut means putting both on the timeline and adjusting one against the other directly, in real time.
Export, without losing what you built
What comes out depends on where the animation is going, and Match-Cut doesn't force one answer:
- Editable SVG — for handing work to a developer or another designer who needs to keep adjusting it, the vector layers export as real SVG, not a flattened image.
- Rendered video — for a finished cut where the animation is baked into the footage.
- GIF — for anywhere a lightweight loop needs to play without a video player.
- Interactive UI animation — for motion that needs to respond to a hover, a click, or a loading state once it ships inside a product.
The point isn't that any one of these is novel on its own — it's that they all come from the same timeline, so the animation doesn't have to be rebuilt differently for each destination.
Where this actually saves time
The honest version of the pitch isn't "better vector tools." It's fewer handoffs. A logo reveal that needs to land on a specific frame, a lower third that has to match the pacing of a cut, an icon set that needs to ship as both a video intro and a standalone animated asset — all of that used to mean moving between a vector tool, a compositor, and an editor, flattening something at each step along the way. On one timeline, it's the same file the whole time.