Rooster for short-form clips

The job, most weeks

Where the time goes

• The meter

  Clipping is a volume activity. Ten clips a week from two hours of source is exactly the usage pattern a per-minute allowance is priced against, and the source has to be transcribed before you can find anything in it.

• The upload

  The long recording has to go up before the short clip can come out, and the long recording is the big file. Every clip you make is downstream of one slow transfer you did not need to make.

• Finding the moment

  Without a transcript this is scrubbing and remembering. With one it is reading and clicking, which is the interaction Rooster is built around: clicking a word moves the playhead, and a text selection is a media selection.

Competitor pricing and behaviour described above was checked in August 2026. The arithmetic is in the Descript pricing breakdown and the alternatives round-up.

How Rooster fits

• Transcript editing

  Click a word to seek to it. Select the passage that makes the clip and the header shows its word count and its measured duration, so you know whether you have ninety seconds before you cut anything. Delete removes the rest as an undoable ripple edit across every track.

• Vertical and square canvases

  Projects compose to a 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1 canvas, with Fit and Fill and safe-area guides so a caption does not end up under a platform's interface. Preview and export consume the same composition, so what you frame is what renders.

• Captions

  Four presets, previewed immediately on the canvas and burned into the exported file, which is what a muted vertical feed needs. SRT and VTT come from the same cues if a platform prefers a sidecar.

• Export

  H.264 or HEVC in an MP4 at 720p, 1080p or project size, rendered on your Mac, with progress and cancellation, defaulting to Downloads and never silently overwriting a file. Ten clips cost ten renders and nothing else.

• Finding the moment

  Reading is the method, and it is the only one today: you find the moment by reading the transcript, not by opening a list of suggestions. Click a word to hear it, select the passage and the header tells you whether you have ninety seconds before you cut anything. Proposing highlight ranges from the transcript, each one spun into a project of its own, is the next tool of this kind to be written, and it will offer candidates to approve rather than cutting anything itself.

• B-roll and layered media

  An overlay track composites above the primary video in both preview and export, and every clip on it carries a full picture-in-picture transform, so a cutaway can be a full-frame replacement or an inset in a corner.

Every feature above is described in more detail on the features page. Planned launch pricing is $12.99 a month or $99 a year, with a $249 lifetime licence on the direct download, and every paid tier is unmetered - the reasoning is on the pricing page.

What Rooster will not do for you

• No template ecosystem, trend library or trending-audio catalogue. If your clips are built from a template with this week's sound, a short-form editor built for that is the right tool.
• No auto-reframe or subject tracking when you move a 16:9 recording into a 9:16 canvas. You choose Fit or Fill and the framing is yours.
• No posting to TikTok, Reels or Shorts, and no scheduling. Rooster exports files.
• No stock music, sound-effect or sticker libraries.
• No suggestion queue that picks the moments for you. Highlight detection is not in the application, so finding the clip is reading the transcript.
• Mac only, on Apple silicon. There is no phone app, and clipping on a phone is a genuinely different product.

This list is here because the alternative is a reader installing Rooster and finding out. If one of these is the job you need done, the alternatives page ranks tools that do it.

Frequently asked questions