Memory-Safe Mobile Video Editing Engine: Timeline Design & Optimizations

The symptoms you see in the field are consistent: the editor plays fine in short demos but users report OOM kills during heavy scrubbing, preview stalls when multiple filters are applied, exports that crash mid‑way, and background uploads that never finish. Those failures come from a single design anti-pattern — eagerly materializing full‑resolution frames for many layers and operations instead of evaluating the timeline as a stream and bounding the working set. Contents [Why a non-destructive t