Crash-safe autosave layer for desktop video editors

The moment a video editor crashes mid-edit — after an hour of trimming, color work, and audio sync — the user opens the app again and finds either a corrupted project file or a state from 30 minutes ago. They know this will happen again. They just don't know when. That moment of reopening a crashed project is when someone starts looking for something, anything, to prevent it next time.

The gap persists because Adobe and others have a structural disincentive to fix this aggressively. Crashes are embarrassing to acknowledge publicly, and deep autosave with reliable state reconstruction is genuinely hard to retrofit into a rendering engine built over decades. The engineering cost is high, the feature is invisible when it works, and it doesn't drive upgrade revenue. So it stays broken.

What users actually report isn't just inconvenience — 'it crashes too frequently, which often causes you to lose data' and 'the crashing is frequent and occurs despite troubleshooting' — meaning the apps' own autosave and recovery mechanisms are already failing them. Built-in autosave exists but it doesn't reliably capture state between save intervals, and project file corruption on crash means even saved checkpoints can be unreadable.

This is a recurring business, not a one-time fix, because crashes don't go away with software updates — users report they've persisted 'after all these years' — and every new project is another exposure. A freelance video editor losing two hours of unbillable rework per crash, multiplied across 30+ projects a year, has a concrete dollar cost they can name. They pay for Dropbox, they pay for frame.io, they'll pay for something that actually prevents that loss.

What to build

Build a background process that hooks into Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve's project file format, snapshots the full project state every 60 seconds into a versioned local store, detects abnormal process termination, and restores the last clean snapshot on next launch — bypassing the app's own recovery dialog entirely.

Where to start

Start specifically with Premiere Pro on Windows, where crash reports are most concentrated and the project file format is well-documented enough through community reverse-engineering to make reliable snapshot restoration feasible before tackling macOS or other editors.

The hard part

Deep hooks into a proprietary project file format that Adobe changes with every major release means you're in a constant maintenance race — the first time a Premiere update silently changes the .prproj schema and your restoration corrupts a client project, you lose the customer and get a brutal review.

How it makes money

Flat monthly subscription per editor, roughly $9-14/month — priced below the cost of a single hour of rework, which makes the ROI conversation trivially easy.