Questions

Frequently asked questions

Rooster is in closed beta and has not gone on sale, 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 closed beta and not yet on sale.

  • 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 both subtitle sidecars - SRT and VTT - export 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?

    Yes, with a review list rather than automatically. Remove filler words finds every hesitation and shows each with the words either side and a play button, so you hear the moment before you decide. Approve them one at a time or all at once, and the approved set is cut as a single undoable ripple. It runs on your Mac with no credit meter, and it reads English hesitations. Cutting every hesitation unasked is how a good take gets mangled.

  • Does Rooster do B-roll?

    Yes, with your own media. Video and stills go on a lane above the recording and music on one below it - drag a file onto a lane, or add it at the playhead from the Media rail. Clips trim and move, and Fit, Fill and corner picture-in-picture are presets. Audio gets its own lane with volume, fades and ducking under speech. A large commercial stock catalogue is deliberately out of scope, so this will never be 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?

    Six things, and they are the whole list. Rooster downloads a transcription model when first needed. The direct download asks rooster.cam whether a newer version exists, once you allow it. Pressing Send in the Send Feedback box posts your message, your email if given, and which build you run. A key you supply sends audio to that third-party transcription service. A fal.ai key sends your prompt and returns a clip. And buying it, once on sale, goes through a merchant of record. The privacy page has the 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 what you send us if you write to support, join the waitlist or apply for the closed beta.

  • What will Rooster cost?

    The planned launch pricing is $12.99 a month or $99 a year, which is $8.25 a month billed annually, alongside a $249 lifetime licence sold on the direct download. Every paid tier is unmetered. Rooster is in closed beta and not on sale yet, 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-minute limits, no Rooster top-ups and no overage maths. Your Rooster bill won't grow with your workload. Record a short clip or a two-hour episode: the price is the same. Optional cloud services use your own account and are billed separately.

  • Is there a free trial?

    A 14-day free trial is planned: the whole application, no watermark on what you export, with a payment method required to start it. There is no free tier, and there is no trial to start yet - Rooster is in closed beta and has not gone on sale. Two weeks is meant to be long enough to get a real project recorded, cut, captioned and exported.

  • Is there a lifetime licence?

    Yes: $249 as a single payment, planned for the direct download and sold there only, never through the Mac App Store. The licence itself never expires, and 12 months of updates are included from the day you buy. After that you can renew to keep receiving updates; if you do not, you keep the version you have and it goes on working. We say that here because lifetime is used loosely in this category.

  • 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. A lapsed subscription drops the application to read-only: every project still opens, but editing and export are locked until it is current again, and nothing is deleted in the meantime. A lifetime licence never lapses, so none of this applies to it.

  • Will these prices change before launch?

    They might. Rooster is in closed beta and not on sale yet, so the prices shown here are planned launch pricing rather than prices you can pay today. We will confirm the final monthly, annual and lifetime prices before launch, and keep this page updated if anything changes.

  • 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 $12.99 monthly and $99 annual, which is $8.25 a month, do not meter recording, editing or export. Our pricing post breaks down Descript's two meters.

  • Which Macs does Rooster need?

    Rooster is built for macOS 26 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 English and 24 other languages on your Mac, and the transcription feature page names every one of them. 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 publicly. Rooster is in closed beta and there is nothing to buy yet: a small group of solo creators and podcasters is using it on real projects, and you can apply to join on the closed beta page at rooster.cam/beta. Everyone else can download it at launch, and the waitlist sends one email when that happens.

  • When will Rooster ship?

    We have not set a public date, and we would rather say so than invent one. The first release is a direct download from this site, with a Mac App Store build planned to follow it. 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.