EditCurve

Edit the cut. Curve the motion.

Act one · the darkroom

Every film starts in the dark.

Footage comes in raw — screen recordings, camera, stills, a folder of clips. EditCurve reads them all, keeps them where they are, and shows you what you've got.

Act two · the edit room

Edit the cut.

A track-based timeline that behaves like one. Blade a clip, ripple the gap closed, push two clips together and the overlap becomes a crossfade. Cuts stay on their track. Record a voiceover, let the Mac transcribe it, and the words go on screen as captions that follow the clip.

Act three · the curve

Curve the motion.

Stopwatch a property, drop keyframes, open the graph editor and drag the Bezier handles until the ease feels right. Draw the position path on the stage itself. Spatial and temporal curves stay independent.

Act four · the mask

Reveal it with a curve.

Bezier masks drawn on the stage, inverted or combined, with a keyframeable feather. The same handles you use for motion shape what the viewer sees.

Act five · the pencil

Draw it. Or describe it.

A Drawing layer is vector paths you can pencil, then edit node by node — stroke, fill, gradient, trim write-on, all keyframeable. The assistant can build the same paths from a sentence, or generate a still and drop it on the stage. You keep every handle.

Act six · the lighting room

Colour, light, depth.

Layers stack with blend modes and parenting. Colour correction, blur, glow and drop shadows with thumbnail presets rendered from your own footage — and every one of them keyframeable. Then real depth: turn any layer 3D, bring in 3D models, and move cameras and lights through the scene with shadows that fall where they should.

Act seven · the cutting room

The real Mac app.

Scroll to step through the stage, the timeline, the graph, the pencil and the assistant — the same UI you get when you download the trial. Click any screenshot to open a larger preview.

Closing credits · everything in the box

The complete feature list.

Open the in-depth guide

Compositions & timelines

Two timeline modes per composition: Composition (a row per layer, for motion design) and Sequence (tracks, for editing)
Sequences: clips butt end to end, splits stay on the track, ripple delete, move to track, track mute and lock
Overlapping clips crossfade automatically, with crossfade-in/out controls, capped so clips never vanish
Nest either kind inside the other as a precomposition
Any size, frame rate and duration; background colour or transparent; stage surround colour
Work area with drag handles; click anywhere on the ruler to move the playhead; snapping
Zoom presets, fit-to-window, preview resolution Full / Half / Quarter
Tall rows show keyframe value curves right on the timeline
Sequence clips show their first and last frames — footage, nested compositions, titles, shapes and pictures
Clips lift with a shadow as you drag them between tracks, the landing track lit; arrow keys for the playhead are yours to set (frame step, play, pause, split…)

Layers

Video, image, audio, text, shape (rectangle, ellipse, line, polygon, star), solid, adjustment, Drawing and precomposition layers
Drawing: pencil on the stage, node and handle editing, stroke / fill / gradient, trim write-on, whole-path morph keyframes
Transform: position, scale, rotation, anchor, opacity, skew, flip — all keyframeable
Blend modes, label colours, parenting, hide / mute / solo / lock
Text with a font picker that previews every family in its own typeface, plus styles, size, colour, alignment, tracking and line spacing
Shapes with fill, stroke and corner radius; solids sized to the composition; adjustment layers affect everything beneath
Fade in / fade out handles on every clip, with a distinct handle colour
3D model layers: USDZ, USD, OBJ, STL and PLY files standing in the same scene as your 2D layers

Components

Save any group of layers and drag it onto any timeline again — bar, text, keyframes and all
Keep one in the project (it travels with the file) or in the library (every project on the Mac sees it)
In a Composition it arrives as its layers; in a Sequence as one clip that plays the whole group
Each drop is an independent copy; hold ⌥ when dropping to link copies so one edit changes them all
Optionally fits itself to the frame it lands in, so a 16:9 title works in a vertical composition

Stock media

Search Pexels for photographs and video from inside the app, and add them straight to the project
Opens on what the service is featuring today, filtered to the shape of the composition you are editing
Watch a clip before downloading it — it streams a small copy, not the 4K master
Choose the size you want; keep clips with a heart; a list of what you downloaded lately, across projects
The creator's credit is kept on the media, shown in the Inspector, in the file's name, and in the README when you package the project
Works with no signup; add your own free key in Settings if you search a lot

Keyframes & motion

Stopwatch any property; keyframes in the timeline and the Inspector
Graph editor with linear, hold, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out and custom Bezier easing you drag by hand
Motion paths drawn on the stage with Bezier handles; spatial and temporal easing independent
Previous / next keyframe buttons and snap-to-playhead
Over eighty one-click Behaviors: entrances, exits, emphasis, Ken Burns, wiggle, float, spin, 3D flips, fly-ins, turntables and camera moves — written as ordinary keyframes you can edit
Motion blur on export
Keyframe arrows on every animated property row, to step through any layer's keys whatever is selected
Every number field steps with ↑ / ↓ as you watch (⇧ ×10, ⌥ a tenth)

Effects, masks & colour

Blur & Sharpen: Gaussian Blur, Directional Blur, Sharpen — with "spread outside box" on or off
Colour: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Exposure, Hue, Temperature & Tint, Black & White
Stylise: Drop Shadow (with true softness), Glow, Cartoon, Mosaic, Find Edges, Posterize, Minimax
Keying: Chroma Key (compares colour not brightness, so an unevenly lit screen keys in one go; spill removal for green on hair and shoulders) and Luma Key
Thumbnail presets for every effect, rendered from your own footage
Inline colour wheel (hue / saturation / brightness / opacity / hex) on every colour swatch
Bezier masks edited on the stage, inverted or combined, with keyframeable feather; crop
Effects stack, reorder, disable, reset — every parameter keyframeable

Media & import

Video: MOV, MP4, M4V, MPEG — H.264, HEVC (incl. alpha), ProRes (all profiles, 4444 alpha), MJPEG, DV
Audio: WAV, AIFF, CAF, MP3, M4A/AAC, FLAC, ALAC
Images: PNG with transparency, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, WebP, BMP, PDF, PSD, camera RAW and SVG (rasterised sharp at any size)
Media tab with folders, preview and scrub in the Inspector, in/out marks, rename, replace, reveal in Finder
Files browser: add any number of folders from anywhere, remembered per project; thumbnails; preview; import or add to timeline in one click
Components and EditCurve projects in the Files browser: preview, add to the project, or drop on the timeline as a nested composition
Several layers at once: shift-click to select, drag them together, align and space them evenly, one opacity or blend for all
Drag and drop from the Finder onto the media list or straight onto the timeline
Paste straight in: a screenshot (⌃⇧⌘4), a picture copied from another app, or files copied in the Finder — ⌘V puts them in Project Media
Lift Subject: cut the subject out of any picture as a transparent PNG, on your Mac, with no account and nothing to pay
Read the words in a picture and tag what it shows, so the Search box finds a clip by a sign in it or by what is in the shot
3D models: USDZ / USD with textures and built-in animation, OBJ with its materials and textures, STL, PLY — looked over in a turnable preview before they come in
Proxies for heavy footage, made in the background: a ring shows progress, a P when ready; right-click to make, remake or stop one
Arrow keys move through the Project, Media and Files lists; Return opens or adds

Audio

Waveforms on clip bars
Volume and pan (keyframeable); Peak Normalize lifts a quiet take to just under clipping
Echo, reverb and pitch shift in the Effects tab — a layer is only offered the effects it can use, so an audio clip never lists a blur
Per-layer mute and solo; video clips keep their own audio, or hand it to a separate layer

Voice, captions & sound

Record a voiceover in the app: microphone picker, level meter, gain, 3 · 2 · 1 countdown — the take lands as an audio layer at the playhead
Play the timeline while you record, so the read matches the picture
Have the Mac read a script instead: pick a voice, press Speak & Add, and the take arrives with its words already timed — captions with no transcribing step
Noise suppression and echo cancellation on the microphone, Apple's own, on by default
Translate captions on your Mac into any of the languages macOS supports — a second captions layer beside the first, same timings, same clip
Analyse a clip's sound: how much is speech, how much is music, where the silent gaps are, marked on the timeline
Transcription runs on your Mac — nothing is uploaded, nothing is charged, no account needed
Transcript in the Inspector: search it, click a line to jump the playhead there, copy the text
Captions as a layer, linked to the clip that made them — move, trim or split the clip and the words follow
Caption font, size, colour, backing and line count; drag them where you want on the stage

Recording & presenting

Screen recording of any display — the app minimises while you record, a floating panel shows the time; Stop or Esc drops the clip into the project
Camera + microphone recording to MOV
Screen snapshot to PNG, even while minimised
Present mode: full-screen playback from the work area; Space to pause, Esc to leave
GPU stage preview for lag-free dragging, switchable in one click
Big Preview window for any clip or picture, with in and out points, a mute button and Add to Timeline; models turn in it

Export & sharing

H.264 MP4; ProRes 4444 MOV with alpha; HEVC MOV with alpha
Presets: YouTube 1080p / 4K, Shorts / Reels, Instagram, High Quality Master, Audio Only, Video Only, Transparent
With a licence: a web page that plays the animation in any browser — one file, nothing to install, starts on load, on scroll, on hover or on click
With a licence: interactive web pages — clicks, hovers, markers and keys make layers into buttons, hotspots and menus, with your own JavaScript when you want it
With a licence: Lottie export — the animation itself as vector JSON for apps and websites, with a layer-by-layer report of what carries over
With a licence: animated GIF and animated PNG, PNG sequences, sprite sheets with JSON, stills, storyboard PDFs and SRT / WebVTT captions
Custom size, bitrate, frame rate, range (whole composition or work area), motion blur
Export queue; transparent exports render over nothing regardless of background
Package Project: collects the project and every media file into one folder with a README
Native .editcurve project files; autosave; unlimited undo

3D, cameras, lights & models

Any visual layer can be 3D: Z position and X / Y / Z rotation, all keyframeable; one-click floors, walls and tilts
Cameras with 15–200 mm lenses, a point of interest and depth of field; Orbit, Pan and Dolly on the stage, previewed live; Isometric, Three-Quarter and Top Down views in one click
Point, spot, parallel and ambient lights with colour, intensity, cone and falloff; soft shadows between layers; per-layer materials
Front, Top, Left, Right and Custom working views with cameras and lights to drag and aim, and a movable viewfinder showing the shot
Red, green and blue move arrows and rotation rings on the stage; pick a rotation in the Inspector and its ring lights up
3D models placed, turned, keyframed and lit like any layer; a USD model's own animation, such as a walk cycle, plays along
Layers are cut cleanly where they pass the camera; motion paths drawn in perspective; nearer layers always drawn in front

AI assistant

Describe an edit in plain English — "add a title, fade it in over a second, soft shadow" — and it makes the change
Creates and edits compositions, layers, timing, transforms, keyframes, effects, behaviors and Drawing paths
Optional image generation: a sentence becomes a transparent still on the stage (Draft / Standard / Best)
Prompt library for titles, motion, drawing and showcase idents — fills the box, never sends until you do
Writes and restyles text for you — wording, colour, weight, tracking and alignment
Bring your own keys: Claude for chat, OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint for pictures; each job can use a different account; keys stay in the Keychain
The thread is saved in the project file; each turn is one Undo step; usage and cost show in the panel
Project descriptions (and, if you turn Images on, your image prompt) go to the provider you chose — never your footage
Paste a screenshot or sketch into the prompt to work from, or speak your request with the microphone
Shows how much AI credit is left as you work, and warns before it runs out
Works in 3D: adds cameras and orbits, pushes in, racks focus, builds isometric stages, lights scenes with shadows
Makes simple 3D models from your words — a gold 3D title on a podium, a glossy logo star — and rebuilds them when you ask for changes

The Mac bits

Native Swift, SwiftUI, AVFoundation and Metal — built for Apple silicon, macOS 15.7.9 or later
Signed and notarized by Apple, sandboxed
Built-in help guide and keyboard shortcuts
Settings ▸ Appearance: turn the text size up across the whole app, with numbers and timecode on their own setting
Settings ▸ Storage: keep recordings, pasted pictures, cutouts, stock downloads, the component library and generated images wherever you like — one folder for the lot, or one each, on an external disk or a folder two Macs share
Settings ▸ Files: folders that appear in every project's Files tab, so a scratch disk is added once, not once per job
Automatic updates in-app
Free trial with no time limit (exports watermarked); limited launch price of $19 / £19 for three Macs, free updates, no subscription

Ask for an edit Opus · Balanced

The assistant edits the open composition with the same commands you use — every change is one undo step.

Done — Title is on the stage.

Added text layer “EditCurve”
Opacity 0 → 100 over 1s
Drop shadow, soft

Undo · AI Edit

Describe the next change…

Act eight · the assistant

Yours to keep.

Describe the next change. The assistant edits the open project — then try everything free. One payment at the launch price, three Macs, free updates, no subscription.

Download free trial for macOS Limited offer · $19 / £19

Notarized by Apple · macOS 15.7.9 or later · Apple silicon