Reel: video editor

A small QuickTime 7 Pro–style video editor for the Mac.

Open a movie, cut what you don’t want, and export it. Edits are non-destructive: nothing touches your file until you export.

Download

Reel-1.7.zip (version 1.7, 1.6 MB)
Requires macOS 26 or later. Runs on Apple Silicon and Intel.

What it does

• Trim — set In and Out points (I and O, as in QuickTime 7), then keep the selection, or press ⌫ to cut it out and close the gap.
• Crop — drag a rectangle over the picture; presets for 16:9, 1:1, 9:16.
• Export H.264 — quality tiers or an exact bitrate, with a size estimate before you commit.
• Remove audio — drop the sound track from the edit.
• Transcribe — on-device speech-to-text; click a line to jump there; export TXT, SRT, or VTT.
• Annotations — keep what you know about the footage while you work: context, notes pinned to moments, and a Markdown briefing to write a caption from.
• Copy — the current frame as an image, or the selected range as a movie.

Known limitations

• Every export re-encodes to H.264, even if you changed nothing. There is no lossless passthrough, and no HEVC or ProRes output.
• Edits live only in the window. Closing a movie discards its trim, crop, and undo history — there are no project files. Export before you close.
• Only the first video track and the first audio track are edited and exported. Extra audio tracks, subtitles, and chapters are dropped.
• Audio always exports as stereo AAC; surround sources are folded down.
• Transcription reads the original file, so its timestamps ignore any trim you’ve made in the window.
• Copy puts a frame or clip on the clipboard for other apps, but there is no Paste — Reel can’t splice movies together.
• Annotations live only in the window, too — closing it without exporting or copying loses them. Nothing is ever saved beside your movie.

App privacy

The Reel app collects no data. No accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no ads, no tracking. It is built from Apple’s frameworks alone, with no third-party SDKs bundled in, so nothing inside it collects on someone else’s behalf either. Your movies stay on your Mac, transcription runs on-device, and the app opens no network connections of its own.

The full policy covers the app, this website, and what happens if you email support: Privacy Policy.

Help / FAQ

Will editing change my original file?

No. Every edit is applied to a copy at export time. The original is never written to.

What formats does it open?

Anything QuickTime plays: MP4, MOV, M4V, and most camera and screen recordings. It doesn’t read Matroska (.mkv), WebM, or other non-QuickTime containers — convert to MP4 or MOV first (HandBrake, or ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c copy out.mp4, which copies the video without re-encoding it) and Reel opens the result normally. Exports are always H.264 in a QuickTime or MPEG-4 container.

Does transcription upload my video?

No. Transcription runs entirely on your Mac with Apple’s on-device speech models. The first use of a language downloads its model from Apple; after that it works offline.

Where are the keyboard shortcuts?

Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts inside the app. They match QuickTime 7 Pro: Space to play, arrow keys to step frames, I/O to set In and Out, ⌘T to trim.

Something broke.

Please email support@galt.software what you did, what you expected, and what happened instead. A screenshot or the movie’s format (Window ▸ Show Movie Properties) helps.