Lunar Studio — What's New

An AI-native, Resolve-class video editor for macOS.

This is a preview release. It is a complete editing pipeline, and it is a first version. The “What’s not in 0.1” section below is not boilerplate — read it before you commit a paying job to this app.

Lunar Studio 0.1 is free and fully unlocked. There is no paywall, no licence key, no account, and no trial timer. Every feature listed here is available to everyone. This is a deliberate decision for the preview, not an oversight — there is no purchase code in the build at all.

Editing

Magnetic and traditional timeline editing: trim, ripple, roll, slip/slide, blade, compound clips, nested sequences, markers, and version history.
Speed ramping, retiming, and freeze frames.
Transitions and motion graphics (transform, crop, opacity, blend modes).
Render cache and proxy generation for smooth playback.
Autosave and crash recovery.

Color

Node-based color page with ACES / wide-gamut color management.
Primaries, curves, LUTs, and scopes (waveform, vectorscope, parade, histogram).
Per-frame subject keying via Vision — isolate a person or the salient region and confine a grade to it, with no tracking or baking.
Reference compare: wipe or split-screen the current grade against the original, a gallery still, or another clip on the timeline.

Audio

Multi-track mixer with per-strip EQ, compressor, limiter, gate, de-esser, reverb, and delay, plus per-clip insert racks.
Bus routing and aux sends, sidechain ducking, and mix automation.
BS.1770 loudness metering, beat detection, and ADR/Foley cue tracking.

Visual effects

Node-based compositing: transform, merge, chroma/luma keys, masks, blur, color, text, and generators, evaluated to real pixels via Core Image.

AI (on-device first, bring-your-own-key for the rest)

Smart Search — find footage by describing it (“the close-up of the woman in the car”). Clips are understood on-device (objects, shot type, palette) and ranked by meaning, with keyword fallback.
Scene detection — segment a clip into shots and drop chapter markers on each cut.
AI assistant — edit in plain language; the assistant proposes structured actions you apply with a click.
Connect a Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini key for full planning. Keys are stored in your macOS Keychain and requests go straight from your Mac to that provider — never through a Moon Bear server. See the privacy policy.

Automation

A local MCP server lets external tools and agents drive the editor. Off by default; enable it in Settings → Scripting.

Export

H.264, HEVC and ProRes delivery of the full timeline — grades, transforms, blends, retiming and the audio mix — with live progress and cancellation.

What’s not in 0.1

Stated plainly, because finding these out mid-job is worse than reading them now.

8 effects in the OFX catalog are placeholders. They are hidden from the effects library and cannot be added, but the entries exist so older projects keep their parameters. Of the 99 catalogued effects, 91 render distinctly (67 full, 17 approximate, 7 alias).
Noise reduction and voice isolation are offline-only. They run for real on export and in the offline mixdown. During live playback, noise reduction degrades to a downward expander and voice isolation does nothing. What you hear while editing is not what those two effects will deliver.
No third-party Audio Unit hosting. The mixer’s effects are Lunar Studio’s own. You cannot load an AU plugin.
No project interchange. There is no OTIO, FCPXML, AAF or EDL import or export. A project made here stays here. Media and rendered files move freely; the edit does not.
No collaboration. Earlier drafts of these notes mentioned a sync/presence prototype. It was removed from the product before 0.1 and is not in this build.
Crash reports are local only. MetricKit diagnostics are written to a file on your Mac and never uploaded, so a crash you hit is invisible to us unless you send it. If something goes wrong, please email us.
No automatic updates. 0.2 will need a fresh download.
The subject-key fallback is rough. If a Vision subject key finds no subject in a frame, that qualifier currently falls back to its colour key rather than leaving the grade unconfined.

Requirements

macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
Apple silicon or Intel. Tested on Apple silicon; Intel is built and signed but has not been exercised on hardware.

Support

hello@moonbear.shop — a real mailbox, read by a human. Bug reports welcome, and the more specific the better: what you did, what happened, what you expected.

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