SlideCut

A fast, keyboard-and-mouse video editor for hard-cut films built from stills and clips — with a real-time 16mm projector / CRT look — that exports straight to H.264 MP4 through ffmpeg.

Native Windows app: C++17, Dear ImGui, Direct3D 11, miniaudio.

Features

• Timeline editing — base picture track that packs shots end to end, free-standing overlay video tracks, multiple audio tracks, and an aspect-ratio track that changes the frame over time. Ripple on/off, splice at playhead, reverse, mute, beat quantize.
• Images and video — drop in stills or clips; video gets background JPEG proxies (360p / 540p / 720p) with prefetch for smooth playback.
• Sequences — fold a selection into a nested sequence, open it, unfold it again.
• Hypercut — chop overlapping shots on different tracks into rapid alternating cuts, by seconds or frames.
• Scene split — detect cuts inside a clip with ffmpeg's scene score and split automatically.
• Per-shot looks — colour grade, black and white, double exposure with ffmpeg blend modes, burned-in text overlays, title cards.
• Film look — GPU projector shader in the live preview: gate weave, curtain ripple, chromatic aberration, halation, lamp flicker, dust, hair, scratches, vignette, grain, and a ragged projector gate. Plus a CRT look with glow, aperture grille, and TV static noise beds.
• Audio — per-clip volume and fades drawn on the timeline, audio FX chain, -14 LUFS loudness normalisation, and track fetch from a YouTube URL (via yt-dlp).
• Rhythm strip — shot lengths, quiet passages, markers, and scenes at a glance.
• Export — whole film or a range, H.264 (x264 or NVENC) + AAC, BT.709, fast start. The film look is rendered in a second pass at full output resolution.
• Safety nets — autosave, timestamped backup snapshots, undo, and plain-text .slidecut project files.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or later, a GPU with Direct3D 11
• ffmpeg on PATH (proxies, scene detection, export)
• Optional: Python 3 with moderngl and numpy for the film-look export pass (projector_render.py)
• Optional: yt-dlp on PATH for fetching tracks

Build

CMake 3.16+ with MSVC or MinGW-w64:

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

The build copies assets/ and the helper scripts next to SlideCut.exe.

Tests (workspace compatibility, UI, media round-trip when ffmpeg is present, and HLSL shader compilation when Python is present):

ctest --test-dir build

Usage

1. Run SlideCut.exe.
2. ADD MEDIA or drag images, videos, and audio onto the window.
3. Arrange shots on the timeline; select a shot to edit it in the side panel.
4. Toggle film look for the projector preview.
5. EXPORT MP4 (or set a range and EXPORT RANGE).

The film-look pass can also run standalone:

python projector_render.py in.mp4 -o out.mp4 --res 4k

License

SlideCut is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0.

Third-party

• Dear ImGui — MIT
• miniaudio — public domain / MIT-0
• stb_image — public domain / MIT
• Special Elite font — Apache 2.0