Roadmap

Fixes a crash that made v0.49.4 fail to open. The app quit immediately on launch, before its window appeared, because it looked for its built-in scene templates in a location that only exists on the machine that builds the release. Nothing was wrong with your recordings or settings — updating to this version restores normal launch. The same fault would also have affected text sources and the mascot panel; both now degrade gracefully instead of quitting if a bundled asset is ever missing.

Identical to v0.49.0 in every feature; re-cut because the v0.49.0–v0.49.3 release runs failed in CI on test-only issues (type-checker time budget on the runner, then a tile-cache test assuming Apple Silicon texture allocation sizes). No app changes — test-file fixes only.

Highlights

• Safer linked edits in cc-cli. Move, trim, ripple-trim, delete, and ripple-delete now apply to a complete candidate before replacing the timeline. Missing, ambiguous, misaligned, or unsafe groups fail without leaving a partial edit.
• Automatic cuts are safer and more complete. Cut analysis no longer stalls when helper tools produce a lot of output, detector limits are reported instead of silently truncating work, action-noise waits are detected, and boundary checks distinguish dangerous word cuts from harmless tight joins.

Improvements

• Rendering and still-frame extraction now honor declared video/audio tracks and source orientation instead of falling back to a container's first track.
• Timeline preview and app export now use the same Transform evaluator. Transform remains read-only in the app inspector so advanced timing data is preserved; validated authoring remains available through cc-cli.
• Recording and source identity is retained through verified import and bin enrichment; unfinished Project File expansion remains development-only.
• Render jobs now own both their timeline and destination until cleanup finishes. Concurrent app and cc-cli renders cannot replace the same file, equal timeline IDs in different roots no longer conflict, stale callbacks cannot affect a replacement job, and cancelled or failed renders preserve an existing destination.

Safety

• cc-cli render rejects destinations inside the timeline bundle or colliding with source media, including symlink and hard-link aliases. Post-promotion activity-log failures are reported as warnings rather than false render failures.
• Multi Track capture and Project File multitrack import/drop are available only in the explicitly packaged Context Cut Dev app. Production and unrecognized bundles fail closed until hardware, topology, recovery, and drop-placement qualification is complete.

Fixes

• Long recordings edit like short ones now. On projects with long source recordings, cutting, selecting, and scrubbing could freeze the app for several seconds at a time. The cause — comparing entire audio buffers during interface updates — is fixed; editing responds instantly regardless of recording length.

Improvements

• The performance readout next to the timecode can now capture a detailed report automatically if the app ever stalls, making any future slowdown much faster to diagnose.

(No changelog block for v0.47.4 found in CHANGELOG.md.)

(No changelog block for v0.47.3 found in CHANGELOG.md.)

Improvements

• Live performance readout. A small honest FPS meter now sits next to the timecode — timeline and playback rates measured from real rendered frames — and any stutter is recorded with what you were doing at the time, so slowdowns can be diagnosed precisely instead of guessed at.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash when box-selecting clips. Dragging a selection box could crash the app when the timeline was mid-refresh; selection drawing now handles that safely.
• Smoother scrubbing on large projects. The tiny clip thumbnail no longer re-processes the full-size preview frame on every scrub step, which could make scrubbing big recordings feel heavy.

Highlights

• A much faster, smoother timeline. The timeline runs on a new rendering engine: waveforms, transcript words, clip thumbnails, and titles are prepared once and reused, so panning, zooming, playing, and scrubbing stay fluid even on long, busy projects. Sections you've already viewed reappear instantly instead of reloading, and cutting or moving clips never causes the strip to redraw from scratch.
• The playhead glides. During playback and scrubbing the playhead tracks exactly what you hear, at full frame rate — no more lagging behind at higher speeds or jumping when you stop.
• First click always works. Clicking into the timeline — even when the app window wasn't in front — selects, trims, drags, or cuts on that very first click. Clicking out of a search or inspector field into the timeline also acts immediately.
• Steadier, clearer pointers. A refreshed cursor set for trimming, cutting, zooming, and moving groups of clips. The pointer no longer flickers when resting on clip edges, and whichever cursor you grabbed with stays put for the whole drag.

Improvements

• Box-selecting many clips is smooth on dense timelines, and pressing Esc cleanly cancels a drag or box-select without committing it.
• Selections are now undoable: Cmd+Z brings back your previous selection — including scattered multi-clip selections — and undoing a delete also restores what you had selected at the time.
• Press B (or C) for the blade tool and V for select. Shift-click adds clips to your selection; Shift+Delete removes selected clips and closes the gaps they leave.
• The zoom control at the bottom of the timeline now shows proper resize and pan cursors on its handles.

Timeline performance enhancements

No notes for this release.

Fixes

• Playback stays perfectly in sync. Audio and the playhead now stay locked together during play, fast-forward, and pause — the playhead follows exactly what you hear instead of drifting ahead of it. Scrub to a spot, press play, and it starts right where you expect.

Highlights

• Restrained, deliberate zooms (agent skill). The editing skill now treats zoom as scarce punctuation — roughly one zoom per 2–4 minutes, on key setup/navigation/small-target moments, staying wide while results and content play out — instead of punching in on every click. In a golden-scored agent eval this lifted zoom-placement match vs hand-edits from F1 0.22 → 0.67 (over-production 7 zooms → 1) with no change to cut accuracy.

Highlights

• New cc-cli analyze-beats — chapter a recording into beats. Splits the timeline into coherent sections wherever the content shifts (a long pause, a scene change, or a change of topic) — no AI calls, fully deterministic. Each beat reports its time range, why it broke, whether it has on-screen action, and a short label, so you can see a video's structure at a glance.

Highlights

• cc-cli audit-edit now scores cuts and dead air too. The combined edit scorecard adds a cuts_clean check (flags risky cut boundaries) and advisory dead-air totals (removable silence still left in the edit), alongside the existing zoom, audio, CTA, and ramble dimensions — a fuller one-call grade of an edit.

Highlights

• New cc-cli retime-zooms — fix zoom timing without touching placement. Re-times every existing zoom so it lands ~0.65s before its click, never ramps before the element is on screen, and holds until the spoken thought finishes — keeping each zoom's anchor and scale exactly as planned. Run --dry-run to preview the plan first; snapshot before applying and revert if the motion doesn't read right.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-edit — one-call edit scorecard. Grades an edit against every objective taste rule at once (zoom framing + timing, voice loudness, CTA spacing, ramble) and returns a single verdict: overall_zoom_pass, audio_voice_pass, per-dimension checks, and advisory trim seconds. The agent skill now points to it as the objective QA step.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-cta. Objective call-to-action rate-limiter: keeps your first clean ask and flags too-close repeat CTAs (affiliate/subscribe/"use my link") plus the salesy justification around them for trimming. Tutorial steps with on-screen action are always kept.
• New cc-cli audit-ramble. Flags condense-worthy ranges — stretches with no on-screen action that repeat an earlier point or over-justify and stray from the video's promise — snapped to completed-thought boundaries so a tighter rewrite stays cohesive.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-zoom-timing. Objective, read-only scoring of zoom timing: for each zoom-in it measures whether the zoom lands ~0.5–0.8s before the click, doesn't start before the element is on screen, and holds until the spoken thought finishes — counting any violations.
• New cc-cli audit-loudness. Objective voice-level check from the recording's audio meter: reports speech loudness, true-peak, clipping and too-quiet percentages, and a peak-safe gain to apply to normalize the voice without clipping.

Highlights

• New cc-cli audit-zoom-framing. An objective, read-only check that scores whether your clicks stay inside — and near the center of — the frame while a zoom is active. Reports a framing_score (higher is better) and flags any click that lands off-frame, so a zoom pass can be graded automatically instead of by eye.