CapRust — Social-first video editor for Windows

Built for short-form creators

Everything you need for TikTok, Reels and Shorts — nothing you don't.

⚡

Native and fast

A single binary built with Rust and egui. Starts in under half a second, uses a fraction of the RAM of an Electron editor.

🎙

AI captions, on device

Whisper generates captions locally. Word-level timings drive a karaoke-style progressive reveal. No audio leaves your machine.

🎯

Auto-reframe

SCRFD face detection follows the speaker and keeps them centred when you switch from landscape to 9:16.

✂️

Magnetic timeline

Ripple delete, snap, trim-follow playhead, multi-select drag, transitions with xfade. It just works.

🎚

Audio that behaves

Fade handles on the waveform, volume keyframes, auto-ducking against music, segmented speed ramps with synced audio.

📹

Screen recording

Record a monitor straight into the media bin. Native DXGI Desktop Duplication, cursor overlay, no OBS or virtual device.

🎬

Multi-camera

Group 2+ clips as camera angles, switch between them from a dock panel, and auto-sync the audio via envelope correlation.

🚀

Hardware encoding

NVENC and AMF on top of the CPU path. Probed at runtime; the export dialog offers only encoders that open on this machine.

🧩

CLAP plugin hosting

Load your favourite CLAP plugins on the master bus. Verified with u-he ZebraHZ 2.9.4.

🤖

MCP server

Drive the editor from Claude Desktop or Cursor through a Model Context Protocol server. 15 tools, undo-stack integrated.

🟩

Chroma key

Green screen in one click. Per-clip key colour, similarity, and edge blend. Preview and export share the same filtergraph.

☁️

Settings that travel

Point CapRust at a Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox folder and it keeps settings in step across machines.

Rust 1.91 egui 0.31 ffmpeg whisper.cpp Piper TTS tract-onnx cpal DXGI clack-host

Download CapRust

v0.9.6 adds disabled states for chip, switch and segmented control, surfaces save/load/export/undo/redo failures as error toasts, and finishes the button-widget sweep across every panel. Everything from 0.9.5 is included.

↓ Download v0.9.6 for Windows

SHA-256 for each release is on the release page.

All releases · Windows 10 1809+ · 64-bit · MIT license

Frequently asked

Is it free?

Yes. CapRust is MIT-licensed open source. No account, no telemetry, no upsell. The source is on GitHub.

Why only Windows?

Windows is the primary target — the majority of short-form creators ship from Windows machines. The core crate is written to be portable and it compiles on Linux and macOS in CI, but UX polish (native dialogs, taskbar integration, WASAPI) is Windows-only.

Where is FFmpeg?

CapRust does not link FFmpeg — it calls ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe as subprocesses. On first run, if neither is on your PATH, it offers to download a static BtbN build (~110 MB) into %APPDATA%\CapRust\ffmpeg.

Do I need to download AI models?

Only if you want auto-captions, narration, auto-reframe or background removal. They download on demand from Settings → AI Models and live in %APPDATA%\CapRust\models. The editor works without them.

It says "beta" — is it stable?

v0.9.6 adds disabled widget states and error toasts for save, load, export, undo and redo. Everything from 0.9.0 through 0.9.5 is included: chroma key, multicam, screen recording, and the original envelope overlay. The rest of the editor - timeline, preview, export, captions, audio effects, CLAP hosting and the MCP server are all in. Expect rough edges; a crash handler writes a report to %APPDATA%\CapRust\crashes if anything goes wrong, and the log is worth attaching to a GitHub issue.

Windows SmartScreen warns me. Is that normal?

Yes. The beta is not code-signed yet. Click More info → Run anyway. Code signing is planned before the stable release.