Open Claude Code in a folder of footage and say what the video should be. It cuts the pauses, lays out the shots, captions every word and exports. You watch it happen in a real Mac editor and fix anything by hand.
macOS 15 or later, Apple silicon. Free to edit, no sign-in. Pro for the agent, 7 days free.
Fast and native. Opens in a second, scrubs 4K without a spinner.
Nothing is imported into a library you cannot open.
Whatever the agent does, ⌘Z takes it back.
Editing needs no sign-in and no upload. Only Pro analyses footage, once per file.
You recorded it in one take. You know which pause goes, which sentence is the hook, where the captions should start. What takes the time is telling a timeline that, one drag at a time.
You find every pause by ear, drag every edge with a thumb, and type every caption. The footage lives inside one app and so does the export.
Final Cut, Premiere and Resolve want a project, an event, a library and a colour page before you cut a 40-second video. You learn a hundred panels to use four.
Upload the footage to a cloud you do not control, wait, get one cut back. The first fix you want means starting over, and the export costs credits.
You describe work to Claude Code all day. BetterEdits lets you describe the video.
No cloud, no upload, no black box. The agent edits the same video, in the same app, that you do.
Every workspace comes with a guide the app wrote for the agent: how videos are made here, what it can do, and the house rules. Claude reads it before you type a word.
Claude cannot watch video. Analysed footage carries every spoken word and when it was said, so Claude takes out the pause you heard and the false start you remember, not a guess.
Claude writes the cut and the app shows it within a second, as one undo step. It draws itself pictures of the result to check its work, and exports when told.
Every change is an ordinary undo step in the app, even a rewrite of the whole piece.
Three jobs the agent does well today, because the transcript tells it what was said and the app tells it what it did.
Claude works on what it can read. With Pro on, it analyses your footage as it needs it, and every video you cut from a file, this week or next year, starts from the words.
Drag it to Applications, make a workspace, tell it where your footage lives. No account.
Click the account badge in the app, sign in, and start the trial. From then on Claude analyses the footage itself when it needs the words: every word, when it was said, what is on screen, saved next to the file. Pro is $19 a month after the trial and grants $22 of analysis credit every month.
See the pricingOpen Claude Code in the workspace and describe the piece. Watch the timeline fill, fix what you like, press export.
Footage that has not been analysed is never refused: it plays, cuts and exports like anything else. Claude can still cut it by time and look at its frames; it just cannot cut it by what was said.
The editor is free and never asks you to sign in. Pro is agent integration: Claude Code and any agent drive it, with your footage analysed so they can cut by what was said.
The editor. Everything you can do by hand, on your own Mac, no sign-in.
Agent integration. Claude Code, Codex and any agent drive the editor, with the footage analysed so they can cut by what was said.
7 days free, card on file, nothing charged until the trial ends. Cancel during the trial and pay nothing.
Agents are only useful when the tool is honest about what it can do. BetterEdits was built for that from the first line: it looks at its own work, refuses a mistake, and leaves an undo behind every step.
The agent reads the transcript when there is one and draws itself frames of the cut to check it before it tells you it is done.
The agent works through the same rules as the window. There is no hidden state it can reach, and no confirmation it can skip.
If the agent writes something the app does not understand, the app says where the mistake is and keeps your version until it is fixed.
Open it anywhere, back it up, hand it to an agent. Nothing is locked inside the app.
A sheet of frames the app drew for the model: one per clip, captions and text on. This is how Claude checks a cut.
When the agent is done, or when you would rather do it yourself, it is a fast Mac editor in the spirit of Instagram's Edits: one magnetic timeline, frame-exact trims, and every part there because a short video needs it.
Drag either edge of a clip and the viewer shows the exact frame. 4K HDR footage scrubs without a spinner.
One shortcut cuts the words into short bars by your rules. Eight styles with a live preview, position per track, burned in at export.
Classic, Modern, Strong, Neon, Typewriter, Meme and more, plus every font on your Mac. Favorites save the looks you like.
Record from the playhead while the timeline plays. Music on the other tracks drops under your voice on its own.
HD, 2K or 4K at 24, 30 or 60 fps. iPhone HDR footage stays HDR all the way to the export.
Switch 9:16, 16:9, 1:1 or 4:5 and clips, text and captions stay put. Reels guides shade the parts the app covers.
For the long-form piece, use Final Cut. Your footage stays in folders both can read.
Everything it doesWhere videos live: a folder of plain files that saves itself and never duplicates a shoot.
A workspace is a folder: workspace.json, a settings/ folder, projects/<Name>/ with three JSON files each, and a cache/. New Workspace… asks for a name, a place, what you make and where your footage lives; the welcome screen lists workspaces opened before.
New Video… asks a name, what the video is about, the canvas and how to start, creates the folder, and writes every change back within a third of a second. No dirty state, no recovery prompt, full undo and redo.
project.json holds the canvas, the brief and the media by name; timeline.json the tracks with one clip per line; styles.json the looks. Written for reading: keys in order, defaults left out, no ids anywhere.
A change written to the files by anything else is applied within a second as one undo step called Edit on Disk. The reader is strict: a mistake is refused with the file and the place, and the app keeps its copy until it is fixed.
Files inside the workspace's media folders are used where they are. Anything else is copied once into the video's media/ folder and stored by relative path, so a video's folder moves as one piece.
Removing a media folder that videos still use warns first and offers to copy the files into each video's own media/ folder before the folder goes.
Open, rename, duplicate, trash and reveal videos from the workspace window; each card shows its size on disk. Close forgets the workspace and shows the empty state, deleting nothing.
Save a Copy As… writes a video as one .be file, the three documents in one JSON object. Import Project File… copies a .be into the workspace.
The media sidebar: the video's own files, your footage libraries, and files that went missing.
The left column shows the video's media/ copies and each library as a folder to enter, with subfolders and a breadcrumb back, as a grid of thumbnails at their own shape with their lengths.
Click a tile once and it plays in the main player, sized to its own picture, with its own play button, time and scrubber. The panel on the right shows where it lives, its length, size, frame rate and sound.
Drag a tile onto the timeline, double-click it to add it to the active track at the playhead, or right-click for Add to Timeline, Open, Reveal in Finder and Export a Copy….
Files dropped on This video, from Finder or a library, are copied into the video's media/ folder without touching the timeline. Import… at the foot brings in video, photos and sound from anywhere.
From a clip's right-click menu or the link under its name in the inspector: opens the source the clip's file lives in, nested folders included, scrolls to its tile and lights it up.
A file gone from disk becomes a red clip that plays and exports as a labelled plate. Relink… or Choose from Sources points it at another file and every clip follows; a file put back is picked up on its own.
A file that has been analysed wears a small Analysed label, and its panel shows the analysis's summary and transcript. A file and its analysis move together when the app copies, consolidates or exports it.
One timeline where footage is dropped, trimmed, split, rearranged and stood in for.
Drop video, photos or audio from Finder, or press ⌘I. Photos become 3 s clips you can stretch to 60 s.
Drag either edge of a clip; the viewer shows the exact frame at that edge while you drag. S or ⌘B splits the selected clip, else the active track, at the playhead. ⌫ deletes the selection.
Drag a clip along the track and its neighbours slide out of the way and snap into place. Drag it up or down to move it between tracks of the same kind.
N toggles snapping to clip edges and the playhead. On a free track ⌥← and ⌥→ nudge a clip by a frame, ⌥⇧← and ⌥⇧→ by a second.
⌘C and ⌘V paste at the playhead on the active track. ⌘D puts a copy right after the original and selects it; it works for clips, placeholders, texts and subtitle bars.
⇧⌘P drops a named stand-in clip at the playhead. On a video track it plays as a black plate with its name, in the viewer and in exports; on an audio track it is silent. Trim, move, split and copy it like any clip.
Replace with File…, the sidebar's Replace… button, or a file dropped on a placeholder takes the clip's spot and length. A shorter file asks whether to keep its own length or fill the rest with a placeholder.
Drag a clip already on the timeline through the middle of a placeholder and let go: the clip takes the placeholder's spot and length, bringing its own in and out, level and placement.
Edit Range… slides which part of a file a clip plays without moving it. The sheet shows the whole file as a strip with a window the clip's length to drag along it.
Video, audio, text and subtitles rows, each with its own panel, lock, visibility and opacity.
On a magnetic track clips stay packed: trims ripple, deletes close gaps, dragging a clip reorders it. On a free track a clip lands at the nearest spot that fits. Text tracks can be magnetic too.
Whatever you select has its settings on the right: a clip shows the clip inspector, a track header its properties (name, magnetic, visibility, mute, level, ducking, order, delete), a subtitles track its Track and Bars tabs.
A locked track refuses every edit: moves, trims, splits, deletes, drops, level and framing changes, and on a subtitles track the bars, style and position. Mute, solo and level still work.
The headphones button solos a track. The eye hides a video, subtitles or text track from the preview and the export; a hidden video track's sound still plays, and hidden tracks dim in the timeline.
Video tracks have an opacity. Below 100% the tracks beneath show through; placeholders take their track's opacity. Headers show a quiet badge when level or opacity is not 100%.
Click a header, or empty space in its row, to focus a track. S, ⌘V and Add Placeholder act there when nothing is selected. Drag the bar above the tracks to resize the area; it scrolls when tracks overflow.
Recording from the playhead, music that ducks, and sound that cuts separately from picture.
⌘R or the mic button records while the timeline plays, drawing the take live on a voiceover track. The transport shows a countdown, then the input device and a live level meter. Stop with Space.
⇧⌘M or drop an audio file on the bottom track. Drag to position, trim the edges, set the volume. A voiceover take is a clip like any other: trim, move, split, level.
Music ducks under voiceovers automatically. Ducking is a per-track switch in the track panel.
Hover a clip with sound to reveal its Final Cut style level line; drag it up or down (snaps at 100%, yellow otherwise). Clips not at 100% wear a speaker badge. Tracks have their own level from 0 to 150%.
⇧⌘D copies a video clip's sound onto a new audio track and silences the video clip, so picture and sound cut separately: a J-cut is a trim away.
Exporting a selected audio clip saves its sound alone as an M4A. A hidden video track's sound still plays; mute the track or set the clip's level to zero to silence it.
Bars from the transcript next to your footage, fixed inline, styled with a live preview, burned in.
⌥⌘T, or Generate Subtitles in a track's panel, fills a Subtitles track with bars from the transcript of each clip's analysed footage, mapped to the timeline and cut by the rules in Settings. The app never transcribes anything itself.
The Bars tab lists every bar for inline editing: click a time to seek, ⋯ or right-click to merge, split or delete. Clicking a bar in the timeline selects it and seeks; Esc drops the selection.
A bar is a start, an end and its text, linked to nothing. Move, trim, split, merge and edit them like anything else; write them by hand in timeline.json if you like. They do not follow later cuts: generate again, or do captions last.
The Track tab has lock, visibility, style, position (Top / Middle / Bottom plus inset), Generate, and arrange and delete. The style menu previews each style in its own look.
Settings › Subtitle Styles edits caption styles with a live 9:16 preview: font, size, colours, background, outline, shadow, uppercase, word highlight.
Settings › Subtitles holds the rules the words are cut by: max words per bar, max bar duration, and the pause that starts a new bar. Generate again to cut an existing track by new rules.
The eye hides a subtitles track from the preview and the export. Visible bars are burned in with the same renderer the viewer uses, brighter than white in an HDR video so they read against the highlights.
On-screen text with 17 Edits-style looks, edited in the sidebar and saved as favorites.
⌘T puts a text at the playhead on a Text track on top of the timeline, adding the track if there is none, and focuses its words in the sidebar. Double-click an existing text to type.
Click a text in the viewer to select it, drag it to move (snaps to the centre), drag a corner to resize so the whole look scales, double-click to edit its words.
Edited in the sidebar: font, size in points, colour, uppercase and spacing, background box, shadow and outline, plus X / Y and Center.
Classic, Modern, Strong, Neon, Typewriter, Meme, Elegant, Literature, Directional, Signature, Editor, Bubble, Deco, Poster, Squeeze, Journal and Rosalia: the closest Google Fonts, bundled with the app.
The Mac's fonts are there too, and the font menu lists every font rendered in its own typeface.
Saved looks, separate from subtitle styles. The Apply menu shows each favorite's name in that look; Save… stores the current one. Settings › Text Styles edits and reorders them; the default dresses new texts.
Texts trim, move, split, copy and delete like any clip and text tracks can be magnetic. The eye hides a text track from preview and export; exports burn texts in. Text never lengthens the piece.
Block out the video before you have the footage, fill it when you do, keep it for the next one.
New Video… can start from a talking head, a tutorial, a b-roll montage, a before and after or a listicle: named slots with notes, the texts, and a voiceover or music slot.
A structure's slots carry notes on what to shoot or pick, editable in the sidebar. Any clip or track takes a note; the app keeps it and never renders it.
A template describes a video without footage: video and audio segments with name, start, duration and notes; texts with words, timing, favorite, position and look.
Import Template… starts a video from one: segments become named placeholders in order, texts become text clips. Claude Code can print the open video as a template, edit it, and import it again.
Four canvases, on-canvas framing, and an export sheet that follows the footage.
9:16 by default. The pill in the viewer's top-right corner opens into 9:16, 16:9, 1:1 and 4:5 with miniatures and asks before changing.
Positions and scales are normalized, so switching the canvas keeps clips, text and captions where they were. Exports follow the canvas, grown to the footage's size.
Drag the selected video clip in the viewer to move it, pinch or scroll to scale, drag the corner handles, or use Crop mode's edge handles.
The Guides menu on the viewer shades the Reels UI and the feed and grid crop zones, so text and captions land where the app will not cover them.
⌘E opens options like the Edits share sheet: HD / 2K / 4K, 24 / 30 / 60 fps, Normal / HDR. HDR is offered only when the footage is HDR; Normal tone-maps to Rec. 709. Defaults follow the footage.
iPhone HLG footage stays HDR through the preview and the HEVC 10-bit export; otherwise exports are H.264/AAC MP4. The preview renders at 1080p; the export at the footage's size, up to 4K.
Exports burn the visible subtitles and texts in with the same renderer the viewer uses. Hidden tracks are left out. Files land in the video's exports/ folder, and the first export in a workspace says where.
⇧⌘E or the button in the clip sidebar exports just the selected clip: a video clip renders its stretch of the timeline with everything on it.
A guide written into every workspace, so Claude Code can cut the piece for you, one undo step at a time.
The app writes its guide into every workspace and refreshes it on every launch: the files, every command, how tracks, clips, text and captions behave. CLAUDE.md is yours and imports the guide.
Claude Code reads project.json and timeline.json, writes the edit in one go, lints it without the app, and the app takes it as one undo step. Commands do the single precise steps.
Whatever the agent does lands in the app exactly like a change you made by hand. You see it in the timeline as it happens, and ⌘Z takes it back.
It cannot watch video, so it reads the analysis next to the footage when there is one, and draws itself a frame or a contact sheet, a grid of labelled frames with text and captions drawn on.
The app writes a permission rule into .claude/settings.json so Claude Code can run its command line without asking each time, and nothing beyond it. Other rules in the file are kept.
Claude Code brings its own model. The app holds only your BetterEdits sign-in, made once from the account badge or with `login`; it lives in the app's own settings, never in a workspace, and the dashboard can sign a Mac out.
The agent can move the playhead and select a clip to show you what it means, and the detail in what it reads back is what it sees, so naming tracks and placeholders helps you follow along too.
Claude Code is what we build for and test with, but any agent that reads a CLAUDE.md-style guide works the same way.
Every key the editor listens to, so your hands stay on the keys.
Space plays and pauses. ← and → step a frame, ⇧← and ⇧→ a second, Home and End jump to the start and end. Click or drag in the ruler or empty track space to scrub.
S or ⌘B split, ⌫ deletes, ⌘C / ⌘V / ⌘D copy, paste and duplicate, ⌥← ⌥→ nudge, N toggles snapping, ⌥⌘L locks the active track, ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z undo and redo.
⌘R records a voiceover, ⇧⌘M adds music, ⌘T adds text, ⌥⌘T generates subtitles, ⇧⌘D detaches audio, ⇧⌘P adds a placeholder.
Pinch or ⌘-scroll to zoom, ⌥⌘= and ⌥⌘- step it, ⌥⌘0 or the Fit pill resets. Two-finger scroll pans.
Pinch, ⌘-scroll or ⌘= / ⌘- zoom the timeline; ⇧Z fits the whole piece. Two-finger scroll pans it.
⌘N new video, ⌘O open, ⌘W close the video, ⌘E export, ⇧⌘E export the selected clip, ⌘, settings. Esc deselects the clip, then closes the track panel.
Download the app, make a workspace, and the guide is already in the folder. Free, no account.
