Why this exists
DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro were made by editors, for editors. Every timeline, node graph and keyframe panel in them assumes you already have the craft — years of it. That assumption is a fair one, and it is exactly why those tools are so good at what they do. It is also the reason most people never make the video they had in mind.
Apelles starts from the opposite assumption: that you know what you want and not how to build it, and that building it is the machine’s job. You describe the result. An agent does the cutting, the colour and the graphics — through the same controls you would have used yourself, on the same undo stack, so you can always take one step back and do it your own way.
Three rooms, one window
A real multi-track editor. Everything a working editor expects to find under their hands is here — and everything here can be asked for in a sentence instead.
“Trim the dead air at the front and cut to the second angle when he stands up.”
Titles, callouts and graphics that animate — built in the same window as the cut, not exported out of a second app and imported back.
“Put his name in the bottom corner for four seconds and slide it in.”
Real colour work, with real colour science underneath — the single biggest difference between footage that looks amateur and footage that does not, and the part nobody teaches you.
“Warm it up, lift the shadows a little, and keep her skin where it is.”
How it is built
Four commitments, each of them checkable in the source rather than a promise on a marketing page.
There is no upload, because there is no server. The masking, the depth, the matting, the transcription and the scene analysis are all models running on your own machine.
Not a setting you can forget to switch on: zero network calls in the grade path is a project invariant, and any cloud call has to be an explicit opt-in and documented as one.
No credits to spend, no export limit, no tier where the good masks live. The whole application is open source under AGPL-3.0, including the parts a commercial tool would charge for.
Every capability described on this site is in the same build. There is no second build.
When the agent makes an edit, you watch it happen — the sliders move, the clip lands on the timeline, and it goes on the same undo stack, so you can take one step back and do it your way instead.
An MCP call and a GUI click run the identical store action. It is a standing rule in the repository that a feature ships with both or it has not shipped.
Your look is a document, not a state the app happens to be in. Open it in a year and the same frame renders the same pixels, so a project can be versioned, reviewed and replayed like code.
Non-determinism in the render path is treated as a blocker bug, and a test renders a fixture and hashes the output.
Pre-launch
There is no public build yet. Leave an address and you will hear from us once there is one worth installing — that message, and nothing else.
