Dawn Cut

What Dawn Cut is

Dawn Cut is a free, open-source video editor for macOS that lets users edit footage through text, subtitles, and silence removal. Its local whisper.cpp transcription creates word-level text and supports Korean auto-subtitles; deleting a range of words cuts the matching footage and closes the gap. Other tools include filler-word detection, subtitle review and correction, color grading, reframing, overlays, and style packs. The project README lists SRT and chapter export, deterministic EDL export, and video rendering through an FFmpeg sidecar. The project describes the editor as fully local, without cloud use or an account, and releases it under the MIT license. Natural-language editing is experimental: it uses a local llama.cpp planner, requires a one-time model download, and has planning quality bounded by its 1.5B model. An experimental headless MCP server can let external agents such as Claude Desktop and Cursor operate on .dawn projects, but MCP rendering does not yet burn in subtitles or overlays, and its npx-installable package is unpublished. Dawn Cut is labeled v0.1; the project says its deterministic editing core is ready to use.