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Compositing that adapts to your workflow.
A motion-graphics and compositing editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Built by editors, for editors.
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Note
Lumit is in public beta. If something breaks or is missing, please open an issue or come and tell us on Discord.
Lumit brings the best of After Effects and Vegas into one editor, so you can composite, cut, and retime without leaving it. It started because most of my time frag editing in After Effects was spent waiting on previews. So the main goal is an editor that stays responsive, however many layers and keyframes a project has.
It's free and open source, forever. No subscription, no licence per seat, and no paying extra for the basics.
The panels, shortcuts, and keyframes work the way After Effects users expect, and the Vegas style of retiming is one switch away. Projects from After Effects open in Lumit with their keyframes, base effects, and any OFX plugins Lumit can find.
Effects can be driven by expressions, wired up in the node graph, or just set in the effect controls.
- Retime, two ways. Retime a layer on a value graph or a speed graph, After Effects or Vegas style, and switch between them at any point.
- Cuts inside a layer. A Sequence layer holds clips cut back to back on one row, like an NLE, and each clip keeps its own Retime.
- Over 100 effects, built in. Glow, motion blur, shake, RGB split, colour grading, Roto brush, Puppet, and many more. Every effect renders on the GPU and has its own page in the manual.
- OFX, CLAP, and VST3 plugins. Sapphire, Twixtor, and the rest are found at start-up and sit beside the built-in effects.
- 3D, text, and shapes. 3D layers with a camera and depth of field, text layers with animators, and shape layers with paint.
- Let music guide you. Beat detection puts markers on the audio, cuts and retimes snap to them, and any property can be driven by a layer's sound.
- Edit one project together. One person hosts and up to 16 people can join, each with their own colour for their pointer, playhead, and selection.
- Your work survives a crash. Every edit is written to a journal as you make it, so if Lumit closes mid-edit your work is offered back next time.
- The interface stays responsive. A late frame lowers the preview quality instead of stalling, and you can keep working while an export runs.
- Keep your shortcuts. Load the After Effects keymap, or read in the shortcut file After Effects saves so your own binds carry over.
- Scripting, the command line, and MCP. Drive Lumit from a script, a terminal, or an AI tool.
Each workspace arranges the window for one kind of work. Switch between them at any point.
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| Graph - a property's curve, as a value graph or a speed graph. | Nodes - the same effects as a wired chain. |
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| Audio - mixer strips, levels, and beat detection. | Cut - clips on tracks, with a source view beside the Viewer. |
Host a project and send an invite. Edits show up for everyone as they're made. Lumit Pro adds a hosted relay for working together from anywhere, with previews, backup, and sync. The editor itself stays free.
Installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux (including Flatpak) are on lumitlab.com/download and the latest GitHub release. Lumit checks for updates and installs them for you, or when you choose.
New to it? The manual starts with installing Lumit and your first composition.
Every translation comes from the community. Pick a language on the translation page, fill in what's missing, and send the file back as an issue.
The engine is Rust and wgpu, in crates/. The interface is Flutter, in flutter_ui/, and the two meet at crates/lumit-bridge.
You need Rust stable (pinned by rust-toolchain.toml), FFmpeg 8.x for media, and LLVM 18 for the binding generator. It has to be FFmpeg 8, the build stops on 7 or 9. Newer LLVM silently generates broken bindings, so 18 is pinned on Windows and Linux.
Windows
Unzip a BtbN FFmpeg 8.1 shared/GPL build
under %USERPROFILE%\ffmpeg\, then:
winget install LLVM.LLVM --version 18.1.8
. .\scripts\win-dev-env.ps1 -Persist
cargo test --workspacemacOS
Homebrew's plain ffmpeg is 9.x, so install ffmpeg@8. It isn't linked into
your PATH, so point the build at it in the shell you build from:
brew install ffmpeg@8
export FFMPEG_PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$(brew --prefix ffmpeg@8)/lib/pkgconfig"
export PATH="$(brew --prefix ffmpeg@8)/bin:$PATH" # the tests make their media with the ffmpeg CLI
cargo test --workspaceXcode's own libclang works here, so there's no LLVM to install.
Linux
Ubuntu 26.04 ships FFmpeg 8, so there it's only packages:
sudo apt install pkg-config libclang-18-dev libasound2-dev libgl-dev libegl-dev \
libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev \
libxrandr-dev libxcb1-dev libwayland-dev \
libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libswresample-dev \
libavfilter-dev libavdevice-devEverywhere else the distro's FFmpeg is the wrong one (7 on Debian 13 and older Ubuntu, 9 on Arch), so leave its FFmpeg development packages out and unpack a BtbN FFmpeg 8.1 shared/GPL build instead:
# Arch / Artix: sudo pacman -S pkgconf clang18 llvm18
mkdir -p ~/ffmpeg8
# The same dated build CI uses, checked against the same hash
f=ffmpeg-n8.1.2-50-g1a748fe2cd-linux64-gpl-shared-8.1.tar.xz
curl -fsSLO https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds/releases/download/autobuild-2026-08-31-13-27/$f
echo "35dc428bf78d3f8a4447a68707338ecf9560ebcc7459967974f9ff5b1f84be24 $f" | sha256sum -c -
tar -xJf $f -C ~/ffmpeg8 --strip-components=1
# The .pc files carry the prefix of the machine that built them
sed -i "s|^prefix=.*|prefix=$HOME/ffmpeg8|" ~/ffmpeg8/lib/pkgconfig/*.pc
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg8/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg8/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg8/bin:$PATH"Then point the build at LLVM 18 in the shell you build from, since the default
clang is newer on all of them:
export LIBCLANG_PATH=/usr/lib/llvm-18/lib # Arch: /usr/lib/llvm18/lib
cargo test --workspaceThe interface needs the Flutter SDK, see flutter_ui/README.md.
- docs/GUIDE.md is the place to start. How to build and run it, the rules code has to follow, and what each crate does.
- docs/ has the glossary, architecture, performance and engineering rules, and the bridge contract.
- crates/ is the engine, a Cargo workspace, and flutter_ui/ is the interface.
- web/ and web-docs/ are lumitlab.com and the manual, and depend on nothing else here.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. Read docs/GUIDE.md first, and use the words in docs/01-GLOSSARY.md in code, interface text, and commit messages. CI has to pass before anything is merged.
Translations don't happen in this repository. Use the translation page instead, since the only language file edited here is the British English source.
Sponsor on GitHub, get Lumit Pro, or just tell a friend.
GPLv3. Forks stay open source.