FilmCraft

FilmCraft is a free Premiere Pro alternative: an open source video editor for Mac, Windows and Linux with the timeline, bins, multicam, colour grading with scopes, keyframes, effects, titles, captions and audio mixing a Premiere editor expects, and export to H.264, ProRes and DNxHR. It is a native app written in Rust, it runs offline, and it never asks for a subscription, an account or a card.

FilmCraft is a clean-room reimplementation of Premiere Pro, so the workspaces, panels, shortcuts and effects follow the layout you already know rather than a simplified editor's. The project tracks its own numbers honestly: about 87 percent of Premiere's menu items, effects, transitions, panels and formats exist, and the team's estimate of how ready it is to replace Premiere on real projects sits at 50 to 60 percent. Editing, trimming, multicam, colour, keyframes, titles, captions, mixing and export all work today; speed on big footage, plugins and HEVC export are the gaps it names.

Timelines move in and out through Final Cut Pro 7 XML, FCPXML, OpenTimelineIO, CMX 3600 EDL, AAF and OMF, so a cut can start in FilmCraft and finish in Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut or Avid, or come the other way.

Native builds for every desktop: a universal macOS app for Apple silicon and Intel with a native menu bar, Windows installers and a portable build, Linux AppImage, deb, rpm and Flatpak packages, and FreeBSD. Hardware decoding runs on macOS and Windows, with hardware H.264 encoding as an opt-in there. There is also a browser build you can host yourself.

The codecs are the project's own Rust code, written from the public specifications and tested frame by frame against ffmpeg: H.264 decode and encode, HEVC, VP9, AV1, ProRes and DNxHD decode, ProRes 422 HQ and DNxHR export, AAC, Opus, MP4, MOV, Matroska, WebM and MXF, plus image sequences and animated GIF. Export jobs run in the background with progress and cancel, and rendered previews are cached so an edit only re-renders what it touched.

FilmCraft is MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed, built by the ArtCraft Team with more than 7,000 stargazers behind it, and free for good: no monthly fee, no trial that expires, no features behind a paywall. Every menu item is a command with an id, and the same engine drives the app, a command-line tool, a control channel and an MCP server, so you can script a cut or let an AI agent trim, grade, mix and export the way a person would.

The complete source of release 0.5.0 as published by the ArtCraft Team, with the project's own MIT and Apache 2.0 notices inside, plus an install guide written for this listing that covers the prebuilt installers for each platform, the browser build and building from source, and a Claude prompt that walks you through setup.