REEL 00 — INTRODUCTION · TC 00:00:00:00
Cut here,not in the cloud.
Cutlass is a desktop video editor written in Rust. The timeline, the preview, and the export all run on your machine — your footage never leaves it. It is open source, early alpha, and honest about both.
A working editor, not a promise.
Everything in this ledger is in the current build. It is alpha software — expect rough edges — but the foundation is real and you can cut footage with it now.
- 01Media importProbe and bring in local footage. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.■ SHIPPED
- 02Multi-lane timelineVideo and audio lanes with linked clips, built on a real data model.■ SHIPPED
- 03Trim, split, move, rippleEvery edit is a deterministic command — replayable and inspectable.■ SHIPPED
- 04Undo and redoFull history. Commands invert cleanly instead of patching state.■ SHIPPED
- 05Live preview with audio syncFFmpeg decode, WGPU compositing, frame and proxy caching.■ SHIPPED
- 06MP4 exportH.264 / AAC out of a desktop app, rendered on your hardware.■ SHIPPED
- 07.cutlass projectsPlain local project files and cache directories you can see.■ SHIPPED
Edits you can trust, replay, and undo.
Cutlass models the timeline separately from the UI. Every edit is a structured command that applies deterministically and inverts cleanly — the same property that makes undo reliable today is what will make machine-suggested edits safe tomorrow.
- core model
- edit commands
- engine
- FFmpeg I/O
- WGPU compositor
- Slint UI
Say the cut. Keep the control.
The roadmap is a natural-language layer where a plain sentence becomes a timeline command — the same deterministic, undoable kind the engine runs today. A direction we are building toward, not a claim about the current build.
| # | YOU SAY | THE ENGINE RUNS |
|---|---|---|
| 001 | “trim the intro” | TRIM IN +00:00:02:12 |
| 002 | “remove the pause before the reveal” | RIPPLE DELETE 00:01:04:08 – 00:01:06:21 |
| 003 | “cut this section” | SPLIT + DELETE RANGE (UNDOABLE) |
- □ Prompt-to-timeline operations
- □ Captions and silence cleanup
- □ Effects, titles, and audio polish
- □ Safer project lifecycle and format stability
Build it from source tonight.
You need stable Rust 1.85+ and the FFmpeg development libraries. Expect bugs, performance cliffs, and a project format that has not settled yet — it is an alpha, and we say so.
# macOS arm64 / Linux x86_64
$ git clone github.com/1Mr-Newton/cutlass
$ cd cutlass
$ cargo run -p cutlass-uiIssues and pull requests welcome — github.com/1Mr-Newton/cutlass
REEL 05 — THE CALL SHEET
Be there when the next cut lands.
Leave an email and we'll write when an alpha build is worth installing — and the day prompt editing ships. Nothing else, ever.