Record your screen or your camera, import media, arrange layers on a timeline, then keyframe anything that moves: position, scale, rotation, opacity, color, and more. Everything renders on a GPU compositing engine, so scrubbing stays responsive on long 4K sources and exports finish sooner.

Made for app makers, creators, founders, and marketers who want a real editor without a subscription or a week of learning it.

Automation — in the Mac app

Switch on Automation and an AI assistant can take a screenshot or a recording, layer it, key a move, caption it, and render a still, a GIF, or a video — MCP on this Mac. You nominate the projects folder; everything inside it is pre-approved, so the assistant never has to keep asking. An installable skill teaches the assistant the project format. Part of the app — no subscription, no separate purchase. Off the Mac, the same job runs headless: headless MCP →

Open source engine

The Rust video engine behind PromoShot is open source (Apache-2.0): author a video as JSON, render it anywhere. A CLI and an MCP server for AI agents, built on wgpu and ffmpeg, render byte-for-byte the same compositor the apps ship — headless, no GPU required, on Linux. Automation above stays the easiest way to drive PromoShot from an AI assistant on the Mac; this is the same engine for everywhere else — CI, a Linux box, or your own tooling. Headless MCP · Linux & CI · View on GitHub →

Animate

Keyframe position, zoom, rotation, opacity, and color — each on its own lane, with its own timing and easing
Drag a keyframe along its lane to retime it
Bend a move along a curve you draw, with motion paths
Motion blur from a camera shutter you set per layer
Play any clip at the speed you want

Compose

Video, image, drawing, caption, audio, and background layers
Masks — window a layer with a shape you draw, then move, scale, and spin that window on its own clock, independently of the footage behind it
Color grade per layer: saturation, contrast, brightness, and tint, plus one-click filters
Blend modes — screen, multiply, and add
Viewports — pan and zoom inside a layer without moving it on the canvas
Sprite sheets, gradient backgrounds, and a reusable project palette

Text

Captions with custom fonts, colors, alignment, padding, outline, and shadow. Text that arrives: types on letter by letter, or assembles word by word. Record voice clips, or have typed lines spoken — bring your own OpenAI, ElevenLabs, or Google Cloud account.

Sources

Capture your screen or a camera, or import videos and images
Trim a video before you place it, and name sub-ranges to reuse as separate clips
Create image cuts from one photo and reuse them as separate layers
Long 4K sources scrub through a lightweight proxy, so the playhead keeps up

Timeline & export

Set layer start times, durations, order, visibility, position, scale, and style
Anchor a layer to its neighbor — "start when the clip below ends" — and it stays true when you retrim
A Lanes view packs layers that never overlap onto shared rows, so a long slideshow reads as a few rows instead of hundreds
Finished videos, selected frames as image sets, or GIF
On Macs with more than one hardware encode engine, exports split across encoders and stitch losslessly
Projects are ordinary .promo folders you keep wherever you like, and can open on iPhone or iPad

Free exports carry a small watermark. A one-time PromoShot Pro purchase removes it — nothing else is locked.

Use PromoShot for app demos, launch videos, social posts, product updates, App Store visuals, and quick promotional content.

A layer editor for promo video.