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 14 Sonoma or later · Apple Silicon and Intel · Also on the Mac App Store
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. ChopShop reads whatever AVFoundation reads, which is just about everything.
- 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 10 languages. English, 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.
Download ChopShopSupport
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.