A Mac video editor that does the editing for you

If you are shopping for a Mac video editor, the field sorts itself quickly. Final Cut Pro is the professional instrument with the learning curve to match. iMovie is free and fine for a simple horizontal cut. DaVinci Resolve is extraordinary and enormous. CapCut and the browser tools give you templates and ask you to do the assembly.

Every one of them is a manual editor. They differ in power and price, but they share an assumption: that you want to sit down and edit. For a founder or builder who needs short-form video so their product gets discovered, that assumption is the whole problem — the editing is the tax, not the goal.

OpenNolan is built for that person. It is a native macOS app where an AI agent assembles the entire vertical video from your raw clips, then hands you a real timeline for the edits you actually care about.

What makes it a Mac app and not a browser tab

OpenNolan runs natively on macOS. Your footage stays on your machine — nothing is uploaded to a service to be processed, and there is no account to create. Rendering happens locally, which is also what makes the editing model work.

That local-first design is deliberate. Video files are large, browser editors spend your time on uploads, and handing raw founder footage to a third-party cloud is a decision plenty of people would rather not make. Running on the Mac removes all three problems at once.

• Native macOS app — not a web app, not a browser extension
• Files stay on your Mac; local-first rendering
• No account required
• Open source, so you can read exactly what it does

Render once, edit cheap

The finished reel is the starting point, not the reward at the end of an evening.

The usual penalty for editing video is waiting. Change a cut, re-render, watch a progress bar, decide you were wrong, do it again. OpenNolan is built so that only happens once.

After the first render, most edits — reorder, retrim, retime, transitions, reposition, text — preview instantly without re-rendering. Only AI-composition scenes need to be rebuilt, and only the single scene you changed. In practice that means refining the agent's first pass stays fast instead of turning into a second editing session.

Vertical-first, because that is where discovery happens

OpenNolan is built for 9:16 / 1080×1920 short-form and exports tuned for Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. It is not a general-purpose editor that also does vertical — vertical is the whole target.

That focus is what lets the agent make real decisions instead of generic ones. It opens on the payoff inside the first second, cuts every one to three seconds so attention keeps resetting, burns in captions because most of the feed watches on mute, and pulls supporting B-roll, images and screenshots so the claim has proof behind it.

• 9:16 vertical, 1080×1920, exports for Reels, TikTok and Shorts
• Burned-in captions styled for mute viewing
• Agent sources B-roll, images and screenshot proof from the web
• Music and sound effects, keyframe animation, explainer animations

What it costs, and what it does not

There is no subscription. OpenNolan is bring-your-own-key: you add your own AI provider API key and pay those providers directly for the AI work, with no markup from us. The app itself is open source.

Being straight about the current state: the Mac app is not released yet and this site is a waitlist. If you need to cut something today, iMovie is already on your Mac and Final Cut Pro is there if you want the professional route. If you would rather stop editing altogether, join the waitlist.

Frequently asked questions