A free editor on your PC
CatCut is a desktop video editor from TJDAX. You edit on Windows, and the project stays on that computer. Export writes a movie file on your disk. There is no account and no upload.
The source is free under the Apache License 2.0.
Timeline
Split and razor
Cut the selected clip at the playhead, cut every track at once, or slice where you click with the razor.
Trim and ripple
Drag an edge to trim. Ripple delete closes the hole, and ripple trim keeps later clips attached to the edge you move.
Roll, slip, and slide
Move the cut between two touching clips, slide the picture inside a clip, or move a clip while its neighbors absorb the change.
Speed
Hold a constant speed from 0.1× to 8×, ramp from one rate to another, or stretch a clip by dragging its edge with Shift.
Magnet
Snap edges to zero, the playhead, markers, and other clips. The snap distance stays about the same on screen when you zoom.
Tracks
Add, delete, and rename video and audio tracks. Mute, hide, solo, or lock a track from its header. Drag a clip onto another track of the same kind.
Marks
Set an in point and an out point. Add markers with a comment and a color, then jump from edit to edit.
Freeze and reverse
Hold the frame under the playhead, or play a clip backward. Undo and redo name each step.
Picture, type, and effects
Transform
Move, scale, rotate, and set the anchor and opacity. Crop four sides, or flip the picture horizontally or vertically.
Keyframes
Key position, scale, opacity, and volume, and choose how the values move between keys.
Transitions
Fade a clip in or out. Cross dissolve, dip to black or white, wipes, slides, pushes, and zoom. Drag the transition to change its length.
Blend and mask
Normal, multiply, screen, overlay, add, darken, lighten, and difference. A rectangle or ellipse mask can be inverted and softened.
Color
Exposure, temperature, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, and saturation. Built-in looks, plus a 3D cube LUT you load yourself.
Effects
Chroma key, blur, sharpen, pixelate, glow, grain, luma key, and vignette. An adjustment clip carries grade and effects over the tracks below it.
Titles
Titles, captions, and a credit roll, with size, outline, shadow, tracking, and leading. Import and export SRT.
Shapes
Star, heart, and arrow titles, plus rectangle and ellipse shapes drawn in CatCut. These are not a downloaded sticker pack.
Audio
Your own files
Import audio you already have. CatCut does not include a music store.
Voiceover
Record from the microphone onto the audio track at the playhead. Preview sound is muted while recording so the speakers do not feed the mic.
Mixer
Clip volume and pan, track volume, mute, and solo. A mixer dock has a slider for each track.
Tone
Three-band EQ and a compressor on the clip. Duck the selection under other audio, or detach a video clip's sound so it can move on its own.
Library and playback
Bin
Icon or list view, posters, search, and sort. Drag a library item or its poster onto a track. Drop a file on the window to import it.
Playback
Play, step a frame, and jump to the next edit. J, K, and L shuttle. Type a timecode to seek. Loop the sequence, or open a full-screen preview.
Preview size
Choose a lighter preview for large sources. Proxies are built so playback does not have to decode the full file every time.
Window
Cat, White, and Cyber themes. Menus in Korean, English, Japanese, or Chinese. Autosave can restore the last session.
Export
Presets
YouTube 1080p and 4K as AV1 in MP4, a vertical Shorts frame, an H.264 compatibility file, and a higher-quality AV1 archive in MKV.
Detailed settings
Set the video codec, width, height, CRF, video bitrate, audio codec, audio bitrate, and sample rate before you pick the file.
Range and still
Export the whole sequence or only the marked in-to-out range. Save the current preview frame as a PNG.
Codecs on this PC
AV1 uses SVT-AV1 or libaom. H.264 uses OpenH264, or NVENC, AMF, Quick Sync, or Media Foundation when that encoder is installed. There is no x264 or x265.
This release
CatCut builds for Windows. The menus can be Korean, English, Japanese, or Chinese. There is no Mac download and no version that runs in the browser.
To build it you need Qt 6, an LGPL FFmpeg shared build, and Visual Studio. The steps are in the GitHub README. Qt and FFmpeg are not inside the source archive.
CatCut does not include cloud projects, a stock-music store, speech captions, or background removal. It does not export ProRes, DNxHR, or Dolby formats.
CatCut is an independent program. It is not CapCut.