How It Works

A GoPro writes a record of the ride into the file: g-force, speed, and the moments somebody tagged with the button. A DJI writes a flight log beside the clip. An iPhone records the scene light and the faces it saw. Layacut reads all of it, because a camera that already noticed something is a better witness than a guess made afterward.

Where the camera says nothing, on-device vision does the work: faces, subjects, framing, movement, and how well composed a frame is, sampled twice a second across every clip. Nothing is uploaded and no model is called over a network.

It listens as well. Voices, and real sounds like waves or engines or cheering, are found in the audio, so a moment worth hearing is a moment worth keeping.

Every candidate moment gets a score from those signals. What the reel is for changes the weighting: choose the people and faces win, choose the action and movement wins. That is the whole of what the setting does, so it cannot quietly reorder your day or drop a clip.

An on-device language model is shown the strongest moments and asked to shape them: what leads, what holds, what follows what. It runs on your own device through Apple Intelligence and never sees a frame of your footage, only the description of the moments. Where Apple Intelligence is off, a simpler director takes over and the reel is still cut.

The reel plays your day in the order it happened. That is a rule, not a preference. What the director changes is the pace.

The track is analyzed for beats and for how it builds. Every cut lands on a beat, within a frame. Shots hold where the reel should breathe and quicken where it should drive, and the length you ask for decides how much of the track is used.

The style can be changed from the reel's panel at any time, and the reel re-cuts around it: Hype is the register for a music reel.

Every clip is leveled by its own picture, from the pillars and door frames and floor lines in it, and on a vertical reel each shot's person lands where the last one's was, so the reel flows from cut to cut. About one cut in five carries a move, chosen from the pack's own rotation, and a move the footage cannot carry becomes a plain cut and says so.

Color is matched shot to shot. Music is leveled, and pulled back under anything worth hearing. Captions are transcribed on device from what was said. The reel fades out with the track and it is done.

The Map draws the reel as a chart: the reel around one ring, the evening by the clock around the other, and the music's energy between. It saves as an image to share.

Twenty transitions now sit beside the plain cut, each timed and shaped off the reference reels rather than invented, and placed by hand from the grid since the director chooses none of them. Six are the ones people reach for most: Jolt, a decaying shake carried across the cut; Eyelids, two soft edged arcs closing and opening like an eye refocusing; Iris and Heart, a shape that grows from the center and the next shot shows through; Blink, the shot blown out for a tenth of a second on the cut; and Pulse, color and light lifting on every beat across the whole shot.

Reveal works differently. The incoming shot's subject, cut out on the device from the footage itself, steps into the outgoing frame from its very first frame, and its own background arrives behind it with a fast dissolve just past the halfway mark. Where the incoming shot has nothing to cut out, it steps back to a plain cut rather than claim a reveal that would not render.

Align carries a shot's framing into the next one on a vertical reel. Each shot's subject lands at about the same height and size as the one before it, so the cuts flow rather than reset the frame each time, and the chain breaks only where a shot has nothing to align by or where it is turned off.

Steady It follows a smoothed path through a shaky shot rather than the shake itself, so a deliberate pan still reads as a pan and a lurch is eased rather than left in, and it also straightens the shot's own horizon, measured from the picture the same way rather than from the camera's gyroscope. It is opt in, clip by clip.

The Map has grown from a flat diagram into a living picture of the day: every shot an arc around a ring, every clip a node placed by when it was shot, threads and traveling pulses showing how the evening became the reel and which clips carried the most of it. It still saves as an image to share.

The music's own speed can be moved too, from four fifths up to one and three tenths, and the reel re-cuts onto the new beat grid rather than drifting off the one it was cut to.

In the next release: text on the reel that follows whoever it is pinned to instead of sitting still, cuts chosen to agree with the motion on either side of them, and a push in with a real sense of depth, the subject and the scene behind it moving at different rates. None of the three is in the build you have today.

Layacut is free to use and free to export at 720p, with a small Layacut mark on the reel, and you can cut the same footage as many times as you like. Every style pack and every gauge is free too. Layacut Pro is an annual subscription that adds 1080p, 4K and 8K export, turns the mark off, and adds your own closing card in its place. One subscription covers your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac.

Because it can. All of the above runs on Apple silicon with no server involved, on an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac, which is why it is fast, why it works with no connection, and why your footage is never anywhere but where you left it.