Apelles Request beta access

Who it’s for

You don’t need to know how to edit.

Apelles is for the person who has something worth showing and no idea which button starts a cut. That is not a stripped-down version of a professional tool. It is a different assumption about who is sitting there.

The assumption every editing app makes about you.

Open Premiere Pro for the first time and it hands you a timeline, a program monitor, an effect controls panel and several hundred keyboard shortcuts. Open DaVinci Resolve and you get a whole page of node graphs. None of this is badly designed — it is some of the best-designed software there is. All of it is designed for somebody who already knows what a J-cut is, why you would ripple rather than roll, and what a vectorscope is telling them.

That person exists and is very well served. If you are not that person, the tool does not meet you halfway. It waits. Most people give up in the waiting, and the video they had in their head never gets made.

Apelles starts from the other end. You describe the result you want in ordinary words, and an agent does the technical execution — the cutting, the colour, the motion graphics — through the real controls, in front of you, on the same undo stack you use. The craft is still happening. It is just not being asked of you.

The same job, both ways.

Neither column is a caricature. The left is genuinely what the work involves when you do it by hand. The right is a shipped capability, and the name underneath it is a function an agent can call today.

  1. “Cut to the bit where she says ‘anyway’.”

    By hand, in a professional NLE

    Scrub the audio waveform until you find the word by eye, drop a marker, position the playhead on the exact frame, then cut.

    In Apelles

    Say the word. The transcript is word-level, so the cut lands on it.

    editor_get_transcript

  2. “Push in slowly on his face as he answers.”

    By hand, in a professional NLE

    Set a scale and position keyframe at the start, another at the end, open the curve editor, ease both so it does not start with a jolt, then check it has not drifted off his face.

    In Apelles

    Ask for the push-in. The keyframes and the ease are written for you, and you can still drag them afterwards.

    editor_set_dynamic_zoom

  3. “These two shots should look like the same afternoon.”

    By hand, in a professional NLE

    Read the scopes on both, work out which one is warmer and by how much, then rebuild the second shot’s primary until the waveforms sit together.

    In Apelles

    Point at the shot you like. The match is measured against real scopes, not eyeballed.

    match_to_reference

  4. “Blur the background, keep her sharp.”

    By hand, in a professional NLE

    Roto her out by hand, or key a mask and track it forward frame by frame, fixing it every time she moves.

    In Apelles

    Name her. A segmentation model finds her and follows her through the shot.

    track_subject

Who this is not for.

If you edit for a living, Resolve is faster than this and will stay faster for a long time. You already have the craft, and describing an edit in a sentence is mostly overhead when you could simply perform it. We are not going to pretend a working editor is who this was built for.

You are welcome here anyway — the colour work is real, the timeline is a real multi-track NLE, and handing the tedious passes to an agent is genuinely useful at any skill level. But the person we are building for is the one who has never opened an NLE and is not planning to learn one.

And what it is not, yet.

  • There is no public build yet. Nothing is downloadable from this site today, and the signup below is the only thing on it that does anything.
  • It runs on macOS with Apple Silicon. Windows has been surveyed and scoped, and not built.
  • There are no screenshots of the Motion or Colorist rooms anywhere on this site, because none have been captured. What those rooms do is described, not shown.
  • It will not tell you what your video should be about. Taste, timing and what is worth saying stay yours; this is a tool for executing the thing you already have in mind.

If that sounds like you

There is no build to download yet. There is a list, and one email when there is something worth installing.

Request beta access