OpenShot 4.0 puts record, color, and local AI masks in one free editor

Client video is still where delivery slows down. Homepage cuts, ad creative, screen explainers, talking-head FAQ clips. Someone records in one app, grades in another, masks in a third, then pays a cloud bill for the AI step.

OpenShot 4.0 collapses that mess into one free, open-source editor. The official blog posted August 30, 2026: Record, Edit, and Color Like Never Before. GitHub tagged v4.0.0 the same day at 18:03 UTC, about 1:03 PM CT. Hacker News put the blog post at #1 with roughly 311 points when we scraped. Download sits at openshot.org/download.

Creative Marketing should put this on the delivery laptop this week. It is a shop tool. It is not a new SaaS SKU and not a reason to upload client footage to a cloud mask service.

What shipped in 4.0

Recording View. Capture microphone, screen, webcam, and system audio directly into the project. Each source lands as its own media file and timeline clip. Mic stays separate from system audio. Webcam stays separate from screen. After the take, you trim one source without wrecking the others. Combined screen and webcam can drop into a rounded picture-in-picture layout using normal clip properties. Platform paths cover Windows, macOS, Linux X11, and Linux Wayland with PipeWire. Options vary by OS and permissions.

Color View. A dedicated grading workspace with a large preview, clip properties, color wheels, and live scopes. The Color Grade effect covers exposure, contrast, temperature, tint, highlights, shadows, saturation, and vibrance. Separate wheels for global, shadows, midtones, and highlights. Four editable curves, including per-channel RGB, with Bezier handles. Industry-standard .cube LUT files with an intensity control so you can blend instead of slam. The whole effect is keyframable. Scopes include Luma Waveform, Histogram, RGB Parade, and Vectorscope, each with a Region tool so you can probe a face or a product instead of the whole frame. Vectorscope includes a skin-tone reference line. Presets such as Auto Contrast, Lift Shadows, Warm Up, and Boost Color are starting points on the same editable effect.

Ten new effects in the engine. Audio Visualization turns sound into waveforms, bars, radial patterns, spectrum displays, particles, and VU-style meters. Beat Sync turns audio energy into a color layer for flashes and rhythmic edits. Film Grain ships with looks like 35mm Fine, 35mm Classic, 16mm Classic, Super 8, and High ISO. Denoise Image, Shadow, Glow, Displacement Map, Timer, Color Grade, and Object Mask round out the set.

Local AI-powered Object Mask. Add positive points on the subject and negative points on the background. OpenShot builds a selection, then follows it through the clip. Models are free downloads from the openshot-onnx collection: YOLO, EfficientSAM, and Cutie converted to ONNX for local execution through libopenshot and OpenCV. No cloud processing. No AI account. No AI subscription. Footage stays on the machine. The finished mask can feed Blur, Pixelate, Color Grade, and other effects, or invert to treat the background. Object Detection also moves to downloadable YOLOv5 ONNX models with segmentation masks and better per-object controls.

Native timeline. OpenShot finished moving off the old web-based timeline. Clips, transitions, keyframes, tracks, rulers, and menus run through a native Qt timeline. Editable timecode in the ruler. Clearer keyframe menus. Nested keyframes from color wheels and curves scale when you retime a clip.

Performance. Against OpenShot 3.5.1 benchmarks, Blur finished 61.8% faster. Sharpen improved 12.8%. Timeline rendering improved 3.4%, or 5.1% with transforms. Scopes, Color Grade, Film Grain, and audio visualization also got cheaper to run. Results vary by hardware and project, and OpenShot says so.

Foundation. Expanded Qt 6 and PySide6 support. Desktop portal integration for modern Linux file access and screen capture. libopenshot 1.0.0 and libopenshot-audio 1.0.0. Android compatibility work is in the codebase, but OpenShot is not announcing Android as a supported 4.0 platform and has no release date for it.

Why CMA cares

We already sell site rebuilds, local SEO, AI receptionist, and automation. Video shows up inside those packages whether we plan for it or not. A homepage needs a 30-second explainer. An ad needs a clean take. An AI receptionist FAQ lands harder when the owner says the hours on camera instead of burying them in a PDF.

The usual stack for that work is expensive and leaky. Screen record in one tool. Edit in another. Mask in a subscription that wants the footage in the cloud. Color in a third app the junior editor does not know. OpenShot 4.0 is not Premiere. It does not need to be. It needs to cover record, cut, grade, and local mask for the jobs we actually ship.

Keep three.ws in its own lane. A 3D talking character on the page is an embed and staging pilot. Edited video is a file we export. Do not mix the SKUs in a proposal. Skip crypto, wallet, and USDC language entirely when three.ws comes up. Staging only. Not a live homepage drop without a click-to-load plan if Lighthouse takes a hit.

How to use it on delivery this week

Install from openshot.org/download. Put it on the machine that already handles client exports. Do not invent a new laptop workflow.

Screen explainers. Open Recording View. Enable mic and screen as separate sources. Record the click path for a form, a booking widget, or an AI receptionist handoff. Trim the mic track without touching the screen take. Export with a modern social preset if the cut is heading to ads.

Talking-head FAQ. Record webcam and mic. Use Object Mask with a local ONNX model to isolate the speaker when you need a clean background or a color treatment only on the person. Keep the model download on the shop machine. Do not upload the client's face to a cloud mask API when the local path works.

Color consistency. When a client sends three phones worth of clips, run Color Grade presets as a first pass, then check skin tones on the Vectorscope region tool. LUTs are fine when the client has a brand look. Blend intensity instead of forcing full strength.

Ad creative. Beat Sync and Audio Visualization are optional polish for music-led cuts. Film Grain and Glow help when a sterile screen record needs to feel less like a spreadsheet. Do not overuse them. The point is a finished file, not a demo reel.

What not to sell

Do not sell "AI video" as a vague product. Sell talking-head FAQ clips, homepage explainers, and ad cuts as deliverables inside rebuild and receptionist packages.

Do not promise cinema-grade finishing. OpenShot is free and local. That is the pitch. If a client needs a finishing house, say so.

Do not put client footage through a cloud AI mask service by default. Object Mask exists so the shop can keep source local. Performance depends on the machine and the model. Test on one talking-head before you promise same-day masks on a 4K multicam.

Do not confuse this with the three.ws character pilot. One is an exported video. The other is an on-page character. Staging language for the character. No wallet.

Where it sits next to CMA offers

Site rebuild. Bundle a short homepage explainer and a service-page clip when the rebuild includes video. Record and grade in OpenShot. Export once. Host on the site we already ship.

Local SEO and GEO. Video does not replace the OpenSEO audit. It supports the pages the audit says matter. If the GEO snapshot shows the brand missing from AI answers, fix the pages and the facts first. Then film the owner saying the same facts on camera.

AI receptionist. Talking-head FAQ clips can sit next to the receptionist for hours, pricing, and service area. Same script the bot uses. Human face for trust. Bot for after-hours.

Automation. Keep naming and folder rules boring: client, date, take, export. Agents can draft shot lists. Humans still hit record.

Natural close: if video is the bottleneck on a rebuild or receptionist package, install OpenShot 4.0 and cut the next FAQ on the laptop. Free editor. Local masks. No new monthly AI line item.

Sources

Primary: OpenShot 4.0 blog (Aug 30, 2026).

Supporting: GitHub v4.0.0 · Download · openshot-onnx · HN item 49507822