Rooster - local, transcript-first video editing for Mac

Rooster is a native macOS app for recording and editing talking-head videos, screen recordings and tutorials. You edit the video by editing its transcript. Delete a sentence in the script and that piece of video is cut. Everything happens on your own Mac.

Who it’s for
It’s built for one person on camera, showing or explaining something: founders recording demos, teachers making lessons, creators making YouTube videos and shorts, and anyone who wants a finished video without learning a pro editor’s timeline.

What it does

• Record in the app: camera, screen, screen with camera, or audio only. There’s a built-in teleprompter that follows your voice, plus pause, restart and a countdown.

• Edit by text: an on-device transcript with word-level timing. Select words and press Delete to cut. Move sentences and the video moves with them. Find and replace words, and fix mis-heard ones without touching the media.

• One-click clean-up: remove filler words like “um” and “uh” after reviewing each one, shorten long pauses, trim silence and catch repeated words and false starts.

• Studio Voice: local speech enhancement that makes a laptop mic sound closer to a studio recording.

• Look better on camera: Eye Contact correction, background removal or blur, and colour grading with presets.

• Captions: a styled caption gallery, word highlighting and animations for short-form video.

• Scenes and layers: split a video into scenes with transitions, add B-roll, images, text and shapes, zoom in on the words you choose, highlight part of the screen and smooth the cursor in screen recordings.

• Music that fits: add a music bed that loops, ducks under your voice automatically and sits at a measured level below the narration.

• Make shorts: select part of the script and make a 9:16 or square version with its own captions.

• Export: H.264 or HEVC video, MP3, AAC or WAV audio, and frame grabs for thumbnails. Exports go to Downloads, and Rooster never overwrites an existing file.

• Version history: go back to any earlier version of a project, even after a relaunch.

Why local-first
Your footage never leaves your Mac unless you choose a cloud provider yourself. Transcription and effects run on Apple silicon’s Neural Engine, so you never wait on uploads, there are no media-minute limits, and the price stays the same however much you record. Your original recordings are never changed: every edit is stored separately and can be undone.

Pricing
There’s a 14-day free trial of the whole app, with no card, no account and no watermark. After that, Rooster is $12.99 a month or $108 a year, or $249 once for a lifetime licence. The founder price is $4.99 a month, locked in while you stay subscribed, for the first 250 subscribers who join by 10 January 2027.

Requirements
Apple silicon Mac, macOS 26 or later.

Try it: rooster.cam

Built by an indie developer who wanted a fast, private, Mac-native way to turn a recording into a finished video. Feedback is very welcome.