Questions

Frequently asked questions

Rooster is in active development and has not been released, so several of these answers are about what is planned rather than what you can use today. Where something is still being built, this page says so. Anything missing, write to support@rooster.cam and we will answer it and add it here.

  • What is Rooster?

    Rooster is a native Mac video editor built around the transcript. You record or import a video, Rooster transcribes it on your own machine, and you cut by deleting words from the text - the picture and sound follow. Captions, Studio Sound, Eye Contact and Green Screen are there too, and an export is an ordinary file in your Downloads folder. It is in active development and not yet released.

  • How does editing the transcript cut the video?

    Deleting a selection of words is a ripple edit on the same edit graph the timeline uses, so the media under those words is removed and every other track closes the gap with it. Cuts snap to word boundaries and to silence measured from the audio itself, so one natural pause survives at the join. A single undo puts the whole edit back, transcript and captions together.

  • Can Rooster record my screen and camera?

    Yes, and this works today. Camera, screen, or screen with camera, with controls for the microphone, display, resolution, aspect ratio and countdown, plus a teleprompter with presentation controls. Recordings land straight in a project and transcription starts by itself as the project is created, so by the time you have stopped talking the text is usually already waiting for you.

  • Can Rooster add captions?

    Yes. Captions are generated from the transcript Rooster already has, styled, timed to the words and burned into the exported video. Transcript, Markdown and SRT export work today as well, so you can hand a subtitle file to a platform that wants one instead of burning the text into the picture. Caption timings survive cuts and corrections made in the transcript.

  • Does Rooster remove filler words?

    Not yet. Filler-word removal is in development and is not in the application today. When it does ship it will work the way the rest of Rooster does: on your Mac, with no credit meter behind it, and with a review list so you approve each cut rather than letting the app guess. Removing every hesitation automatically is how a good take gets mangled.

  • Does Rooster do B-roll?

    B-roll and layered media editing are in development and are not in the application today. The plan is your own media first - clips, stills, music and simple text placed on an overlay lane - with transcript-driven placement after that. A large commercial stock catalogue is deliberately outside the scope, so this will never become a search box over somebody else's library.

  • Where do my exports go?

    To your Downloads folder by default, as ordinary files you can move, back up or open in anything else. Rooster will not silently overwrite something that is already there. Recordings and imported media are treated as immutable and never rewritten: edits live in the project as a versioned edit graph, so the original take is always still the original take.

  • Is Rooster a replacement for Descript?

    For most of the loop a solo creator runs, that is the intention: record, transcribe, cut in the transcript, caption, export. It is not everything Descript does. There is no collaboration, no cloud project sharing, no synthesised AI voices, no translation or dubbing, no web publishing and no autonomous editing agent, and those are deliberate exclusions rather than features waiting in a queue.

  • Does my footage leave my Mac?

    Your footage never leaves your Mac unless you deliberately connect a cloud provider. Transcription, Studio Sound, Eye Contact, Green Screen, the preview and the export all run inside the application, on your own processor and Neural Engine. There is no Rooster server that receives media, so there is nothing on our side to hand over, to sell, or to lose.

  • What does use the network?

    Three things, and they are the whole list. Rooster downloads a transcription model the first time it needs one. If you choose to supply an API key for a third-party transcription service, audio goes to that service because you asked it to. And Apple handles purchases through the Mac App Store. The privacy page sets out each of these in detail.

  • Is there an account to create?

    No. There is no account, no sign-in and no project sync, because there is no server holding your work. That is a design decision rather than something we have not got round to building. It also means no account is ever needed to open your own projects: they are files on your disk, and they stay openable whatever happens to us.

  • Do you train models on my video?

    No, and we could not: we never receive it. The transcription and effect models Rooster uses are downloaded to your machine and run there, and nothing is sent back. The application itself has no analytics and reports nothing about your editing. The only personal data we hold is the email you send us if you write to support or join the waitlist.

  • What will Rooster cost?

    The planned launch pricing is $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, with a lifetime licence whose price is announced at launch. Every paid tier is unmetered. Rooster has not been released, so these are planned prices rather than prices you can pay today, and the pricing page carries the full picture including how they line up against Descript.

  • What does unmetered mean?

    No media minutes, no AI credits, no top-ups and no overage arithmetic. There is no monthly pool of hours to spend and nothing to run out of in the middle of a project. The reason is structural rather than generous: the work runs on your Mac, so your usage costs us nothing, and there is no meter because there is nothing on our side to meter.

  • Is there a free trial?

    A seven-day free trial is planned, with a payment method required to start it. There is nothing to try yet: Rooster is in active development and has not been released. The trial length may still change before launch if it turns out that a week is not long enough to get a real project recorded, cut, captioned and exported.

  • Is there a lifetime licence?

    Yes, that is the plan, and its price is announced at launch rather than guessed at here. Lifetime means lifetime access to a named tier - that tier's feature set plus its updates - not everything Rooster ever ships. It is planned for the direct download and as a one-off Mac App Store purchase, alongside the monthly and annual subscriptions.

  • What happens if I stop paying?

    You keep your projects and your exported media. They are files on your Mac rather than rows in our database, and no account is needed to open them. Exactly what a lapsed subscription can still do inside the application is being decided before launch, and it will be stated plainly in the App Store listing rather than discovered after the fact.

  • Will these prices change before launch?

    They might. Rooster has not been released, and everything on the pricing page is labelled planned launch pricing for exactly that reason. One thing will not change: we will not raise the price on anybody already subscribed. Discounts, introductory offers and deal campaigns happen around the list price, and the list price holds for the people already paying it.

  • How does that compare with Descript?

    Descript's Hobbyist plan is $16 a month billed annually or $24 monthly, and Creator is $24 billed annually or $35 monthly, both metering media minutes and AI credits, checked 14 August 2026. Rooster's planned $9.99 monthly and $69.99 annual, about $5.83 a month, carry no meters at all. Our pricing post breaks down what each of those meters counts.

  • Which Macs does Rooster need?

    Rooster is built for macOS 15 and Apple silicon. Local transcription, Studio Sound, Eye Contact and Green Screen all lean on the Neural Engine and on the unified memory Apple silicon provides, which is what makes them fast enough to be worth running on the machine in front of you rather than in somebody else's data centre.

  • Which languages does transcription cover?

    Parakeet, the default engine, transcribes 25 European languages on your Mac. For anything outside that list, whisper.cpp is selectable inside the application and covers roughly 99 languages, more slowly. Parakeet is the default because on our own test material it matched whisper.cpp large-v3-turbo for accuracy at 13 to 28 times the speed, using a fraction of the peak memory.

  • Can I edit on Windows or iPad?

    No. Rooster is a native Mac application. There is no Windows build, no iPad app and no version that runs in a browser, and none are planned. The whole argument for the product is that the editing runs on hardware you already own, which is the opposite of a browser tab talking to somebody else's render farm. A Mac is the requirement.

  • Do I need a fast internet connection?

    Only once, to download the transcription model the first time Rooster needs one. After that you can work on a plane, at a venue with hostile wifi, or in a hotel, because nothing is uploading and nothing is queued behind anyone else's job. Transcription starts the moment you stop recording rather than after a file has finished travelling somewhere.

  • Is Rooster released?

    Not yet. Rooster is in active development and there is nothing to download or buy today. Recording, transcription on your Mac, transcript editing, captions and export work in development builds; B-roll, layered media editing and filler-word removal do not exist yet. This site describes what is being built, and labels the parts that are still in development.

  • When will Rooster ship?

    We have not set a public date, and we would rather say so than invent one. The first release is headed for the Mac App Store, with a direct download alongside it for the lifetime licence. The signal to watch is this site: the prices lose the word planned and a download link appears on the day there is something to download.

The longer versions of some of these live elsewhere on the site: what runs where is on the how it works page, the planned prices and the meter comparison are on the pricing page, and what does and does not cross the network is set out in full in our privacy policy.