How EditCurve actually works.

Composition & sequence

Two timeline modes in one composition.

Most tools pick a side: a motion-design stack, or a track editor. EditCurve keeps both, and you can nest either inside the other.

• Any size, frame rate and duration; a colour background or a transparent one; a surround colour on the stage.
• Work area with drag handles. Click the ruler to move the playhead. Snap to edges, markers and the playhead.
• Zoom presets, fit-to-window, preview at Full / Half / Quarter.

The stack

Every kind of layer, including Drawing.

A layer is the unit of work. Video, image, audio, text, shape, solid, adjustment, Drawing, and a precomposition of either timeline kind. Transforms, blend modes, label colours, parenting, hide / mute / solo / lock — all on the layer, all keyframeable.

• Text — a font picker that shows every family in its own typeface, plus size, colour, alignment, tracking and line spacing.
• Shapes — rectangle, ellipse, line, polygon, star; fill, stroke, corner radius. Solids fill the composition.
• Adjustment — effects on everything beneath, without touching the footage.
• Fade-in and fade-out handles on every clip, with a distinct handle colour, on picture and on sound.

Motion

Keyframes you can see and pull.

Stopwatch any property. Diamonds land on the timeline and in the Inspector. The graph editor is linear, hold, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out, or a Bezier you drag by hand. Spatial motion has its own path on the stage, with handles; spatial and temporal easing stay independent.

• Previous / next keyframe, and snap-to-playhead.
• Sixty one-click Behaviors — entrances, exits, emphasis, Ken Burns, wiggle, float, spin. They write ordinary keyframes, so you can edit or delete them afterwards.
• Motion blur on export, when you want the move to read on a still frame.

Vector on the stage

Draw it, then keyframe the path.

P picks up the pencil on a Drawing layer (one is created if you need it). A stroke becomes nodes with handles. Click the line to edit them: drag, double-click sharp or smooth, Option to break symmetry, delete a node, insert one without changing the shape.

• Stroke colour, width and caps; closed paths can fill with a solid or a gradient.
• Trim Start / Trim End is a write-on. Whole-path keyframes morph when the node counts match.
• The assistant can add and animate the same paths — icons, diagrams, simple characters, handwriting.

Workflow

The assistant is a step in the edit.

It is not a window on top of the app. The last Inspector tab is a chat that changes the open project — compositions, layers, timing, keyframes, effects, behaviors, Drawing paths. You stay on the stage. You can undo the whole turn in one step, named “AI Edit”.

Type what you want: “add a title, fade it in over a second, soft shadow.” It does the work with the same tools you have. The thread is saved in the project file, so a reopen continues. Usage and cost sit in the panel.

• Your keys. Claude for chat; OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint for pictures. Accounts and jobs are separate — a turn can talk on one account and paint on another. Keys stay in the Keychain.
• Prompt library. Titles, motion, drawing, showcase idents. It fills the box. Nothing is sent until you press return.
• Images, optional. Off by default. Turn Images on and a sentence can become a transparent still on the stage (Draft / Standard / Best), then the assistant keys it like any other layer.
• What leaves the Mac. A description of the project (and, if Images is on, your image prompt) goes to the provider you chose. Footage never does.

Look

Effects, masks and colour on the same stack.

Blur, sharpen, colour, stylise and keying — each with a thumbnail rendered from your footage. Every parameter can be keyframed. Reorder, disable, reset. A colour wheel sits on every swatch.

• Gaussian, directional blur, sharpen; spread-outside-box on or off.
• Brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, hue, temperature & tint, black & white.
• Drop shadow with real softness, glow, cartoon, mosaic, find edges, posterize, minimax.
• Chroma key and luma key. Bezier masks on the stage — invert, combine, feather over time. Crop.

Footage

Keep files where they are. Browse them here.

Import does not swallow the disk. Point at folders from anywhere; they stay remembered per project. Thumbnails, preview and scrub in the Inspector, in/out marks, rename, replace, reveal in Finder. Drag from Finder onto the list or straight onto the timeline.

• Video: MOV, MP4, M4V, MPEG — H.264, HEVC (including 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, SVG (sharp at any size).

Sound

Waveforms on the clip, volume on a curve.

Video keeps its own audio. Separate audio layers sit on the same timeline. Volume and pan are keyframeable; pitch shift and audio effects are on the layer. Mute and solo are per layer, the same controls as picture.

Capture

Record the screen, the camera, then present.

Screen recording of any display — the app minimises, a floating panel holds the time, Stop or Esc drops the clip into the project. Camera and microphone go to MOV. A snapshot writes a PNG even while minimised. Present mode is full-screen playback of the work area (Space to pause, Esc to leave).

The stage preview can run on the GPU so dragging a layer does not hitch. One click to switch.

Out

Masters, alpha, and a folder you can hand over.

H.264 MP4; ProRes 4444 MOV with alpha; HEVC MOV with alpha. Presets for YouTube 1080p / 4K, Shorts / Reels, Instagram, a high-quality master, audio only, video only, transparent. Or set size, bitrate, frame rate and range yourself. Transparent exports render over nothing, whatever the stage background is.

• A queue, so you can stack jobs.
• Package Project collects the project and every media file into one folder with a README.
• Native .editcurve files, autosave, unlimited undo.