The free video editor that makes your videos look finished — not “good enough.”

cutwire.org/drift

Translations: العربية · বাংলা · Español · Français · Italiano · 日本語 · 한국어 · Polski · Português · Русский · සිංහල · Tagalog · Tiếng Việt · 简体中文

Drift is a video editor for Linux, Windows, macOS and Android from CutWire Studios. Drop in clips, add effects, captions, stickers, and music, then export a polished video — with no subscription, no watermark, and no account.

It is built for the edits people actually make: Reels and Shorts, game clips, school projects, tutorials, product demos, memes, and anything you want to look sharp without living in a browser or paying a monthly fee.

What you see in the preview is what you export. One compositor, one look, no surprises.

Linux — install from Flathub:

flatpak install flathub org.cutwire.Drift
flatpak run org.cutwire.Drift

macOS — install via Homebrew:

brew install --cask cutwire-studios/tap/drift

First launch on macOS: Drift is signed ad-hoc (not notarized by Apple). The quarantine attribute is automatically removed when installing via Homebrew. If you install manually via .dmg or if Gatekeeper still blocks opening it, run:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Drift.app

Or grab a build for your platform from the latest release:

On a phone, install from Google Play, or grab Drift-*-arm64-v8a.apk from the latest release and install it (or adb install Drift-*-arm64-v8a.apk). Use x86_64 for emulators.

See all releases for previous versions and full changelogs.

An agent can edit the open project. Import, cut, grade, and export in the project you have open. The same editor can run with no window.

3D on the timeline. Tilt clips in space, light them, and park a title behind the subject. Drop in a .glb model or a gaussian splat and it plays in the same cut. A scene camera dollies, cranes, and orbits on its own lane, and the preview flips to a free 3D view with gizmos when you need to place things.

Lottie animations. Motion graphics and vector art stay sharp at any size. Recolour or reword them in place.

Advanced keyframing. Animate position, scale, rotation, 3D depth, masks, lights, and any effect parameter. Shape the motion in a graph editor with Bezier handles, elastic and bounce easing, and presets you save yourself.

Color grading. Wheels for shadows, midtones and highlights, master and per-channel curves, HSL, and .cube LUTs. Read the shot on a histogram, waveform, parade or vectorscope. Grade one clip, then apply it to the rest.

Masks that follow the shot. Shape, freeform and image masks with feather and invert. Point and planar trackers pin a mask, a title, or a sticker to something moving, or steady the clip. Blur or pixelate any masked area.

150+ transitions and 40+ effects. Every look previews on your footage. One click can drop a whole stack — Beat Drop, Glitch Cut, Neon Cutout. Trails of earlier frames, and grades that stick to one clip.

On this machine. Click a subject and lift it off the shot. Add depth of field and lights that belong to the clip. Automatic captions, voices, video upscale, and live face retouch — all on your device. Models download once, for free, the first time you use them.

Voices that speak your script. Type it, or hand over the subtitles, and Drift reads it back in 21 languages on your own machine. Clone a voice from a few seconds of audio. Cloud voices are there if you bring your own key.

Edit the words. Speech becomes text on the clip. Cut phrases, drop fillers, strip silence, pick the best takes, label speakers, and build captions from those times.

Titles with a real look. Thirty-three packs — karaoke, Hormozi-style, neon, chrome, holographic, handwritten. Copy one style onto every subtitle on the track.

Move a whole stack at once. One layer can drag, scale, rotate, tilt, and fade everything under it. Nest layers, or open a composite when the stack needs its own timeline.

Cut to the music. The timeline snaps to the beat. Clips split and land on the bar. Music ducks under speech and comes back to its own level. Reframe a landscape take into a vertical video that follows the face.

Workspaces for the job. Edit, Color, Audio, Keyframes, Masking & Tracking, Subtitles, Source Lab and more. Dock panels where you want them, float them onto a second screen, and save your own layouts.

Prep footage before it hits the cut. Source Lab scrubs a clip frame by frame, marks the good and bad ranges, and splits at scene changes. Crop, reframe, normalize, denoise, stabilise, or upscale it, then send it to the bin or export a fast trim.

A timeline that behaves. Multi-track filmstrips, ripple, snap, masks, freeze frame, bookmarks, a mixer. Split a clip and the grade stays. A crash leaves the last save intact.

Audio that sounds finished. Clean up speech, meter loudness, EQ and compress, keep pitch when you change speed, record a voiceover.

Find shots. Switch cameras. Search footage for what’s on screen. Watch every angle at once and punch the cut.

Stabilise, export, take the project with you. Smooth shaky clips, upscale, play heavy files smoothly. MP4, GIF, audio-only, or just a range. Pack the media with the edit so paths stay whole.

Android is the same editor. Timeline, effects, masks, cutouts, text, 3D models, voiceover, and export on the phone. Share straight from the app. Tablets and Chromebooks get the full desktop layout.

Stock, voices, and a small install. Search stock into the bin. Generate voiceover and sound effects. Fonts, stickers, and extra models download when you use them. UI in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish (Spain and Colombia), French (Canada), Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Simplified Chinese.

Most “free” editors want an account, a watermark, or a subscription the moment the video starts looking good. Drift is the opposite: yours, on your device, GPLv3, no login wall.

It is fast enough for a 30-second social cut and deep enough for a real project — an agent on the timeline, 3D and gaussian splats, color grading, keyframe curves, tracking, captions, voices, effects, audio, cutouts, and multicam.

Build, packaging, architecture, and agent protocol live in docs/:

• Building, testing, packaging, and architecture
• GPU effects
• GPU transitions
• Agent access / MCP

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue on GitHub.

CONTRIBUTING.md is the pull-request guide: open an issue before a large change, keep each request to one change, run the tests, and license the work under GPLv3.

Effects, transitions, templates, and audio effects are addons. Send those to Drift-Addons. Changes to the engine that runs them stay in this repository.

Installing a release and editing a real project is enough to help; file what broke, or what should work better. On Discord, people who have contributed can ask for the @Contributor role.

GPLv3 — see LICENSE.