A real Mac editor — timeline, tracks, keyframes, color — with an AI agent wired straight into it. One long recording in, a week of posts out; every edit lands as an ordinary clip you can still drag by hand.
For humans in a hurry — and for the assistants that get asked.
Daoclip is a native macOS video editor with an AI agent wired into the real timeline. The agent calls the same operations the menus do, so whatever it makes is an ordinary clip you can drag, trim and undo by hand.
Three complaints run through the editing forums we researched, month after month. Daoclip is built as an answer to those three, not as another feature list.
The complaint: renting an editor forever to cut a video now and then.
Daoclip: $9 a month if you only need it this month — or $175 once and it is yours, updates included. Same app either way. No feature paywall, no credit meter, no watermark.
The complaint: an update eats the drafts and the files are nowhere on disk.
Daoclip: a project is a package in ~/Movies
with your media inside it. Autosave, version history, draft recovery after a
crash — all local. Nothing is uploaded unless you ask for a service that needs it.
The complaint: a black box that spends credits and cannot touch the edit.
Daoclip: the boring, useful AI runs on your Mac — transcription, subject tracking, caption translation, cutout. Free, offline, instant. The generative stuff is opt-in, with your own API key.
Other tools bolt a chat window onto a render farm. Daoclip hands the agent the same 80+ operations the menus use — on your actual project, with undo intact.
Every one of these is a real operation on your project — the same code the menus call, each one undoable. A sample:
…and about fifty more, from manage_node_graph to
pronunciation.
Prefer to click? Every one of those is a menu item too. The agent is an accelerator, never the only door.
Silence and filler cuts, highlight picking, 9:16 reframe that tracks the subject, captions in 16 styles, safe zones for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, cover-frame picker.
Write or paste a script, get a voiceover, and let each line claim its own slot on the timeline — then fill the slots with your footage, stock or generated shots.
Wheels and curves, qualifier secondaries, looks, masks and power windows, LUFS loudness, ducking, auto-mix, ProRes and HEVC out — one render path, WYSIWYG.
House rule: anything that appears in the UI appears as an agent tool as well. No second-class surface.
Multitrack video and audio, drag & drop, split, ripple delete, snapping (⌘ turns it off), waveforms, track lock, blend modes, 22 transitions, speed curves 0.25–4×, keyframes, edit history, autosave and versions.
Transcribe on device, edit in a transcript panel, apply one of 16 caption looks, go word-by-word for karaoke, translate, and check nothing hides under platform UI.
LUFS measurement, ducking under voice, auto-mix, roles and a channel strip, silence and filler removal, voice polish, mic recording, beat detection, and 8 sound effects baked offline — echo, hall, room, phone, robot, bass.
Wheels and curves, qualifier and secondaries, looks you can copy between clips, power windows that track the subject, shape layers, sharpen and denoise, chroma key, 6 film filters and 20 stylize effects with their own time windows.
Apple’s Vision, speech and translation frameworks do the unglamorous work: transcription, subject tracking, one-click cutout, background removal, stabilization.
Describe an intro or a lower third; the agent writes a React/Remotion component, Daoclip renders it, and the clip waits in the bin until you approve it.
Every stock and generative service is a single JSON manifest — ElevenLabs, Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, Openverse, Freesound and more ship built in, and a new model or library is a file you write yourself: no SDK, no build, no waiting for us.
H.264 1080p/720p, HEVC 1080p/4K, ProRes 422, MOV, single-frame export, 9 platform canvas presets with safe zones, chapters, and an attributions file written for you when stock is used.
Drag footage, paste a link, pull stock, or record a voice track. The project takes the format of your first clip.
Say what the video should be. The agent plans, calls editing tools, and reports what it changed — in the same window.
Generated shots, voices and motion clips wait in an approval window. Nothing lands on the timeline behind your back.
Take the mouse back: nudge cuts, grade, mask, keyframe, fix a caption line. It is a normal timeline, not a rendered result.
Safe-zone check, loudness check, retention audit, then export the codec your platform wants. No watermark, ever.
Every panel below is a screenshot of the shipping build — colour, effects, masks, audio, captions, formats. Version 2.87.
Competitor terms change often — this is our reading as of August 2026, and their own sites are the authority. Rows we lose are in the table too.
| Daoclip | CapCut Pro | Premiere Pro | DaVinci Resolve Studio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price shape | $9/mo, $99/yr, or $175 once | Subscription only | Subscription only | One-time licence |
| AI agent editing your real timeline | Yes — 80+ tools, all undoable | No | No | No |
| Works with the AI agent you already pay for | Yes — connect a CLI agent over MCP | No | No | No |
| Captions, cutout and tracking without cloud credits | On device | Cloud features, paid tiers | Cloud credits for several AI tools | Local, Studio-only for some |
| Project files you can read and back up | Package in ~/Movies |
Cloud-linked projects | Local project files | Local library / database |
| Watermark or export limit on paid tier | None | None on Pro | None | None |
| Runs on Windows / Linux | macOS only today — Windows in the works, no date | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Add a service yourself — a new model, a stock library | Yes — one JSON manifest, no code, no SDK | No | Plugin SDK, developer work | Plugin SDK, developer work |
| Marketplace of templates, LUTs, courses | Not yet — young app, small catalogue | Large template market | Huge ecosystem | Huge ecosystem |
| Team / shared storage collaboration | No — single-editor tool | Cloud teamwork | Team Projects | Multi-user in Studio |
If you need Windows, a shared-storage team workflow, or a marketplace of ready-made templates and courses, buy the big suite — we would rather you keep the money than ask for a refund.
Transcribe, cut the dead air and the ums, pick the moments, reframe vertical, caption, done before the guest’s follow-up email.
Saves the whole clipping pass — the part nobody enjoys.
Beat-cut montages, trend effects, karaoke captions, hook-first structure, cover-frame picking, safe zones per platform.
A day’s batch becomes an afternoon.
Script assembly with voiceover, punch-ins, progress bars, chapters, pronunciation dictionary for your product names.
Lesson videos stop being a two-day job.
Node-graph pipelines for repeat formats, style kits per client, ProRes and 4K HEVC delivery, attribution files handled for you.
Per-seat AI bills stop growing with the client list.
Every plan is the full app: all tools, all exports, no watermark, no credit meter. Try it free for 7 days first — no card, no account.
For a single busy month, or for trying it on a real deadline.
Two months cheaper than paying monthly. The default for people who post every week.
A hundred people back the app early, and keep it for good. When the hundredth is gone, lifetime goes with it — Daoclip becomes subscription-only, and there is no second batch.
Anything missing? Ask support [at] daoclip [dot] com — a human answers.
Daoclip
yt-dlp if you have it installed;
everything else works out of the box.~/Movies/VidHarvester as document packages —
a project file plus a Media folder you can open in Finder. Copy it to a drive, put
it in your own backup, hand it to someone else. Nothing is locked in a database or
a cloud account.Download it, open your worst project, and ask for three shorts. If it doesn’t save you the afternoon, you’ve lost nothing but the download.