ChopShop
The missing audio + video editor for Mac. Open a clip, chop it, ship it — no project to set up, no render queue, no two-day tutorial. The everyday tool for the cuts you make 20 times a week but don't want to fire up Final Cut for.
7-day free trial · macOS 15 Sequoia or later · Apple Silicon and Intel
Every other Mac A/V editor wants a relationship. Final Cut wants a library. Premiere wants a project. DaVinci wants three days of your life. iMovie wants a magic-movie tutorial. Sometimes you just want to trim two minutes off the front of a screen recording, splice two voice memos together, or grab a single frame as a PNG — and you want it done before the app finishes launching.
That's what ChopShop is. The everyday A/V tool that the Mac shipped without. Native, fast, no project setup, no render queue, no cloud account. Drop a file on it and start chopping.
What it does
Open and go
Drag a file in, start cutting. No "create new project," no scratch-disk picker, no media-import wizard. The timeline appears the moment the file lands.
The cuts you actually make
Trim the edges, split at the playhead with ⌘K, drag to reorder, drop new clips between. Retime, reverse, crop on export. The 90% of editing you do every week — without the 10% you do once a year clogging the toolbar.
Ship it lossless
If your edit doesn't need re-encoding, ChopShop won't. Same codec, same bitrate, no quality loss — exports finish in seconds, not minutes. Falls back to a clean re-encode the moment you add a crop or stack mismatched formats.
- Launch to first cut: about three seconds. No splash screen, no template chooser, no "Welcome to ChopShop" tour. The empty state has one button: Choose Files….
- Drag any file in. Voice memo, screen recording, GoPro clip, an old AVI, a podcast WAV — plus Matroska (.mkv), WebM, Ogg, and FLAC. ChopShop converts the formats macOS doesn't read natively on import and caches the result, so the timeline appears as fast for an MKV as it does for an MP4.
- Lossless when it can be. Every export tries passthrough first — same codec, same bitrate, instant write. Re-encodes only when you've actually changed pixels (crop, mixed formats, overlapping clips). The status line tells you which path's running before you hit Save.
- Split at the playhead. Position, hit ⌘K, drag the half you don't want off. The fundamental editing motion, with one shortcut and zero configuration.
- Real trim handles. Grab a clip edge, watch the source preview seek to the new in/out point per-frame as you drag — exactly like Final Cut, without the rest of Final Cut.
- Audio + video on separate rails. Unlink them with ⌘⌥L for J/L cuts. Multi-clip selection across both tracks with ⌘-click. No timeline-track configuration step.
- Mixed-aspect timelines just work. Mix 16:9 footage with portrait phone clips and each shows at its own native ratio in the preview. No "set project resolution" dialog.
- Frame-accurate everything. Arrow keys nudge a frame, ⇧ jumps ten. Fps comes from the clip under the playhead, so the step is always real — no "set project fps" gotcha.
- Retime and reverse without the wait. Set any clip to 0.5× / 1× / 2× or custom. Reverse pre-renders in the background; you can keep editing while it works.
- Copy a frame to anywhere. Edit → Copy Current Frame grabs the playhead frame to the clipboard as PNG. For when someone asks "can you screenshot 0:43?" and you don't want to open a second app.
- Tiny project file.
.chopdocuments are pretty-printed JSON pointing at your source media — kilobytes, not gigabytes. Move them around, email them, diff them in git. - No account, no cloud, no telemetry. Pure Swift on AVFoundation. Doesn't talk to a server. Doesn't watch what you edit. Doesn't need an internet connection to open a file.
- Localized into 11 languages. English, Українська, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Русский, 简体中文.
Screenshots
Get ChopShop
Notarized, signed, and gatekeeper-friendly. 7-day free trial; after that, a one-time license unlocks unlimited exports. No account, no telemetry.
Support
Questions, bug reports, or feature requests? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you’ll get a reply, usually within a day or two.
For how-to documentation, see the ChopShop documentation.
For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.