Tutorials.

EP 01

Getting started

SmashCut is a free desktop video editor for macOS and Windows. Download it, drop in footage, and cut. You don't need an account to edit — everything runs on your machine, and your footage never leaves it.

Install

1. Download SmashCut — the site detects your OS, or pick macOS / Windows manually.
2. Open the installer. On macOS, drag SmashCut into Applications; on Windows, run the setup and follow the prompts.
3. Launch SmashCut. You land on the Home screen, ready to start a project.

That's it. No sign-up, no license key. Editing is free.

Create a project and import footage

From the Home screen, click New project. Give it a name and pick a resolution and frame rate — or leave the defaults and let the first clip you import set them.

To bring in footage:

• Drag files from Finder or Explorer straight onto the media library or the timeline.
• Or use File → Import to browse for clips, audio, and images.

Imported media shows up in the library on the left. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — SmashCut references the files where they live on disk.

Make your first edit

The timeline is multi-track: stack video tracks for overlays and b-roll, and keep audio and captions on their own lanes.

• Trim by dragging a clip's edges. Split with the blade at the playhead.
• Keyframe position, scale, rotation, and opacity from the inspector to animate anything over time.
• Color tools live in the color panel — exposure, contrast, temperature, and saturation per clip.
• Every action is undoable. Cmd/Ctrl+Z walks the full history back.

Export

Press Export in the top right. Pick MP4 for delivery or ProRes for further grading, choose a destination, and render. The result lands on your disk — see the Export section for formats, caption files, and covers.

EP 02

Connect your agent

SmashCut ships with a local MCP server. While the app is running, it listens at http://127.0.0.1:19790/mcp — on your machine only. Point any MCP-capable agent at it and every edit becomes a tool call: cut, caption, layout, export.

Claude Code

One line in your terminal:

claude mcp add --transport http smashcut http://127.0.0.1:19790/mcp

Open a project in SmashCut, then ask Claude Code for an edit — "remove the silences in ep-047 and caption it." You'll see the tool calls stream in the terminal while the timeline updates live.

Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop gets one-click setup: in SmashCut, open Settings → Agents and click Set up Claude Desktop. SmashCut hands Claude Desktop a .mcpb bundle; approve it and the connection is done — no config files.

Cursor and Codex

Both speak MCP over HTTP. Add a server entry pointing at the same address:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "smashcut": {
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:19790/mcp"
    }
  }
}

For Cursor that goes in its MCP settings; for Codex, in its MCP configuration. Restart the agent and the SmashCut tools appear.

Attributed and undoable

Every agent edit is attributed in the project history. An agent can undo its own work — never yours. If a session goes sideways, roll back the agent's edits and your cut is exactly where you left it.

SmashCut also ships bundled agent playbooks — proven multi-step workflows like podcast-to-shorts — that your agent can run end to end.

Local by design

The MCP server binds to 127.0.0.1 and is only reachable from your machine. Your footage stays on disk, and SmashCut never trains on it.

EP 03

Cut a podcast into shorts

The clipper workflow turns a long recording into a batch of captioned vertical shorts. It's transcript-driven: you edit words, and the timeline follows.

Work from the transcript

Import your recording and open the Transcript panel. SmashCut transcribes the episode and shows every word next to the timeline.

• Select a silence block and delete it — the timeline ripples closed.
• Select filler words ("um", "you know") and remove them the same way.
• Select any sentence and the playhead jumps there; delete it to cut it from the video.

You're cutting the episode by reading it, which is much faster than scrubbing waveforms.

Pick your moments

Mark the strongest segments as clip ranges — a hook, a hot take, a punchline. Each range becomes its own short. A typical hour-long episode yields three to six.

Switch to 9:16

Apply the vertical layout to your clip ranges. SmashCut reframes the shot for 9:16, and you can adjust the crop per clip so the speaker stays centered. Stack b-roll or a second camera angle on the tracks above.

Per-word captions

Turn on captions and every word appears on screen exactly when it's spoken. Pick a caption style — font, size, color, highlight — and it applies across all clips. Fix a misheard word in the transcript and the caption updates with it.

Batch export

Open Export → Batch. Every clip range is listed with the platform presets — TikTok, Reels, Shorts — already sized and encoded correctly. Check the ones you want and export them all in one run. Each short renders as its own file, with caption sidecars if you want them.

Or let an agent run it

This whole workflow ships as a bundled playbook. Connect your agent, then prompt: "Turn this episode into three captioned shorts." The agent runs the same steps as tool calls — transcript cuts, vertical layout, captions, batch export — and every edit it makes is attributed and undoable.

EP 04

Export

Everything renders locally, on your hardware, straight to disk.

Video formats

• MP4 (H.264) — the delivery default. Plays everywhere, uploads everywhere.
• ProRes — a high-quality intermediate for grading or finishing in another tool.

Resolution and frame rate follow your project settings; override them per export if a platform needs something specific. The batch exporter's TikTok, Reels, and Shorts presets set size and encoding for each platform automatically.

Caption files

Alongside the video, SmashCut writes standard caption sidecars:

• SRT — for YouTube, and most players and platforms.
• VTT — for the web.

Captions come straight from the transcript, so a correction in the transcript panel is a correction in the exported file. Burned-in per-word captions render into the video itself; sidecars are for platforms that want a separate track.

PNG covers

Export any frame as a PNG cover — scrub to the frame, choose Export → Cover, and you get a full-resolution still, sized to the clip's aspect. Useful for thumbnails and platform cover slots on vertical shorts.

Deterministic renders

The same project renders to the same output, every time. That matters when agents do the exporting: a re-run after a one-word caption fix changes that word and nothing else, so you can diff, re-export, and trust the result without re-watching the whole file.