The open-source video editor that stays out of your way.

Cut, grade, caption and export short-form video in one fast app. For Mac and Windows.
Open source (GPL-3.0). The alpha is a free download. No account, no watermark.

Why · Features · Install · Status · Roadmap · Community · Formats · Contributing

✨ Why Sequence Studio

• Feels familiar. A multi-track timeline, Source and Program monitors and Effect Controls, where you expect them. If you have edited before, you can start cutting right away.
• Fast. Written in Swift. On the Mac the picture is drawn with Metal and decoding is hardware accelerated; on Windows it is Direct3D 12 and FFmpeg. The editor stays responsive, also on smaller machines.
• Uncluttered. One tool per job, no panels you never open, no upsell. Panels dock, tab and float.
• Made for short-form. Rough cut, b-roll, titles, captions, a quick grade, export for vertical and widescreen.
• One codebase. The editor UI and engine logic are shared between macOS and Windows, so a feature is written once.
• Open source, free during the alpha. Download the alpha builds for free. From the first stable release the ready-made builds are paid. The source stays open under the GPL-3.0.

🎬 Features

Timeline Multi-track editing with ripple, roll, slip and slide trims, insert and overwrite, razor, markers, nested sequences, undo for everything and autosave. Fast Cut sequences add a magnetic mode where every edit closes gaps for you.	Playback Hardware decoding, frame cache and prefetch, proxy generation for heavy footage, and GPU compositing that matches the export. Monitors can float as their own windows. An optional guide draws a platform UI mock over the Program monitor.
Effects and motion Transform with keyframes and curves, blurs, drop and long shadows, outline, trails, transitions, speed changes and Lottie animations. Quick Apply puts a favorite effect or preset on the selected clip from a search popup.	Color Grading with scopes and LUTs, and Match Color, which matches one clip to the look of another.
Masks, tracking and analysis Shape masks, picture (matte) masks, Magic Mask (click a subject, then track it), point and mask tracking, stabilization, auto reframe and scene-change detection. Gyro-based stabilization uses Gyroflow (optional, Mac). On Windows, Magic Mask and scene detection are wired up; stabilization and auto reframe are not available yet.	Titles and captions Text layout with bundled open fonts, caption styles, on-device speech transcription (Apple speech on the Mac, whisper.cpp on Windows) and subtitle import. Premiere-authored .mogrt templates can be imported as title templates.
Audio Per-track and per-clip effects, noise suppression, silence removal, ducking, loudness normalization on export.	Export A queue with progress, presets for common social formats, smart rendering where possible and an optional sidecar .srt. ProRes is Mac only.

Also in the box: a start window with recents, 9:16 and 16:9 starting points and templates; Premiere Pro project and effect preset import (experimental, the import report lists what was skipped); Lottie and .mogrt import; and an optional local HTTP/MCP edit API so scripts and agents can read and edit the open project (off by default, see docs/EDIT-API.md).

📦 Install

Mac: download the latest .dmg from the Releases page and drag Sequence Studio to Applications. You need a Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Release builds are Developer ID signed and notarized. If a build is only ad-hoc signed (the release notes say so), right-click the app, choose Open and confirm once.

Windows: a Windows 10/11 x64 build comes with the release; until an installer is published you can build it from source, see Build from source.

Free or paid? While Sequence Studio is in alpha, the .dmg and the Windows build are a free download. From the first stable release, the ready-made builds (signed and notarized .dmg, Windows installer, updates) are paid to fund development; the price is not set yet. The source code stays open under the GPL-3.0, so you can always build it yourself, see Build from source.

🚧 Status: Alpha

Sequence Studio is alpha software. It already does a lot, but most of it has had limited hands-on testing, so expect rough edges. Project files may change between versions: keep backups and do not use it for paid work yet.

Mac and Windows share one app. The editor UI (timeline, monitors, inspector, color, text, library, dialogs) is drawn by shared code (SQDraw*, SQAppShell, SQEditorSession); only the media, GPU, audio and window backends differ per platform. On the Mac the shared app is now the default; the older AppKit UI is kept as a fallback (SQ_APPKIT_UI=1, see scripts/run-shared.sh); Windows only runs the shared app. A command audit of the two is in docs/FEATURE-PARITY.md.

Works today

• Timeline editing, Fast Cut magnetic sequences, undo, autosave, nested sequences, markers, floating panels.
• Playback with hardware decoding, caches and proxies, with the same compositor as the export.
• Effects, keyframes and curves, transitions, speed, Quick Apply, Lottie clips, masks, Magic Mask, tracking, stabilization.
• Color grading with scopes, LUTs and Match Color, titles, captions, on-device transcription, audio effects.
• Export queue with social presets, H.264 and HEVC (and ProRes on the Mac), loudness normalization.
• Premiere Pro project import, .mogrt template import, local edit API.

Not there yet

• Windows (x86-64, Direct3D 12) is a first alpha for developers: it runs the shared app on FFmpeg media, with Magic Mask and whisper.cpp captions. A per-user installer (Setup.exe) exists and Help > Check for Updates reads the GitHub releases, but nothing is published there yet and updating means downloading the new Setup.exe. No ProRes, no HDR, no Gyroflow, stabilization or auto reframe, and some commands answer "not available in this window yet". Much of it was verified by tests and headless runs, not yet by long hands-on use.
• No Intel Mac, Windows on ARM or Linux.
• Premiere import covers a subset of effects and project features.
• Plugin support and a node-based color mode are not started.

See the Roadmap for what is coming next and where you can help. Found a bug or missing something? Open an issue. Feedback shapes what gets built next.

💬 Community and support

• Chat: join the Discord to ask questions, show your edits and meet Pip, the helper bot.
• Website: getsequencestudio.com, with downloads for Mac and Windows.
• Support the project: Sequence Studio is made by one person, with no ads and no investors. If you like it, buy Pip a coffee once or monthly. Supporters get a key and can be named in the credits.
• What's next: the Roadmap lists what is planned and where you can help.
• Bugs and ideas: open an issue.

Formats

Import (video)	iPhone HEVC (SDR and HDR/HLG), H.264, camera footage such as Sony XAVC (S-Log3), ProRes, .mkv and .webm (HDR on Windows is not done)
Import (other)	Still images, animated PNG, Lottie, subtitle files, Premiere Pro projects, .mogrt templates
Export	H.264, HEVC, ProRes (422, 422 HQ, 4444; Mac only), with presets for social formats

Build from source

Mac: you need Xcode 26 and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).

xcodegen generate
scripts/build.sh            # builds the app, prints errors only
scripts/run-shared.sh       # builds, then starts the app on the shared UI (the Windows code path)
scripts/test.sh [Package]   # tests one package, or all
scripts/check.sh            # tests the packages your change touches, UI lint, app build

Windows: the app lives in Windows/SQWinApp and builds with SwiftPM (Swift 6 for Windows, an FFmpeg LGPL shared build in SQ_FFMPEG). Optional runtime pieces: whisper.cpp for captions (scripts/win-whisper-setup.sh) and ONNX Runtime for Magic Mask (scripts/win-onnx-setup.sh). The portable packages test on Windows with scripts/win-test.sh <Package> build|test; scripts/win-app.sh builds and runs the app on a Windows PC driven from a Mac.

Optional: scripts/build-gyro.sh builds the Rust Gyroflow engine (needs a Rust toolchain). Without it the app works; only the Gyroflow stabilization method is unavailable. Test footage is not in the repository: put your own under TestMedia/ (git-ignored). More in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Packages

The engine is split into Swift packages under Packages/; App/ is the Mac app shell, Windows/SQWinApp the Windows app and Tools/ holds development executables.

Package	Purpose
SQCore	Project model, rational time, timeline edit logic, undo snapshots, project file, autosave. No AVFoundation or AppKit.
SQMedia	Media import and probing, demuxing, video and audio decoding, thumbnails, relink.
SQRender	Metal compositor, effects and presenter.
SQPlayback	Playback clock, frame cache, prefetch, decode scheduling, audio engine.
SQExport	Export settings, frame source, writer, loudness normalization.
SQAudioFX	Audio effects, including noise suppression (RNNoise).
SQAnalysis	Stabilization (including Gyroflow), tracking, Magic Mask, scene detection, reframing.
SQProxy	Proxy media generation and cache.
SQLibrary	Media library: bins, folder watching, search.
SQText	Text layout, titles and bundled fonts.
SQTranscribe	Speech transcription (Apple speech, whisper.cpp), captions and subtitle files.
SQLottie	Lottie rendering (ThorVG).
SQPremiereImport	Reader and mapper for Premiere Pro projects and effect presets.
SQEditAPI	Local edit API server for scripts and agents.
SQEditorUI	Theme, panel layout, timeline and monitor views of the AppKit app.
SQUIKit, SQTimelineUI, SQMonitorUI, SQInspectorUI	AppKit controls and panels (design tokens, icons, timeline, monitors, inspector).
SQDrawKit	Portable draw-list UI toolkit: canvas, glyph atlas, controls and renderers (CoreGraphics, Metal, D3D12, software).
SQDrawShell, SQDrawTimeline, SQDrawMonitor, SQDrawLibrary	Shared panels drawn with SQDrawKit: menus and dialogs, timeline, monitors, Project and Effects libraries.
SQEditorSession	Portable editor session: commands, selection, tools, analysis flows.
SQAppShell	The shared app shell and panel hosts both platforms run.
SQFrame, SQGPU, SQGPUD3D12	Neutral frame type, GPU backend protocol (shaders in Slang) and the Direct3D 12 backend.
SQMediaFFmpeg	FFmpeg demuxing, decoding and export encoding (Windows).
SQOnnx	ONNX Runtime wrapper for subject masks (Windows).
TestSupport	Shared helpers for tests (timing).

Contributing

What is planned next is in the Roadmap. Pick something, or tell us what matters to you. Issues and pull requests are welcome, in English. Please open an issue before starting larger work. Read CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct first. Security problems: see SECURITY.md. Questions and ideas are welcome as issues.

License and credits

GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE. Every binary release links the source tag it was built from. Third-party code, fonts and libraries with their licenses are listed in docs/THIRD_PARTY.md, among them Gyroflow (GPL-3.0), ThorVG (MIT), RNNoise (BSD-3-Clause) and the bundled OFL fonts.

Sequence Studio is an independent project. Not affiliated with Adobe; Premiere Pro is a trademark of Adobe. Other product names are trademarks of their owners and are used for identification only.

Built with help from Claude, Anthropic's coding assistant.