OpenShot 4.0: Record, Edit, and Color Like Never Before

OpenShot 4.0 has arrived, bringing some of the biggest creative workflow upgrades in our history. You can now record your screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio directly into a project. You can correct and grade footage with color wheels, curves, LUTs, and professional video scopes. You can also isolate subjects with locally run machine learning models and create everything from animated audio visualizations to cinematic film looks. It is a major step toward a faster, more complete, and more creative OpenShot. OpenShot 4.0 Highlights New Color View: Correct and grade footage with approachable presets plus the precision of color wheels, curves, LUTs, and live video scopes. New Recording View: Record your microphone, screen, webcam, and system audio directly into a project, with each source kept separate and editable. 10 new effects: Create audio-reactive graphics, beat-synced flashes, cinematic film looks, cleaner footage, animated timers, and more. Local AI-powered masks: Select and follow subjects using free downloadable models that run on your computer, with no cloud service or subscription required. A cleaner native timeline: Work with smoother zooming, easier keyframes, editable timecode, clearer clips, and more consistent interaction. Faster effects and editing: Performance work makes Blur dramatically faster while also improving Sharpen, timeline rendering, video scopes, color grading, and audio visualizations. Smarter creative workflows: Reorganized menus and presets make camera moves, animation, color looks, film styles, and audio edits easier to find and apply. A more modern foundation: Expanded Qt 6 support improves compatibility with newer Linux distributions and lays groundwork for Android and other future platforms. Meet the New Color ViewColor can fix a problem shot, guide the viewer's attention, or completely change the mood of a scene. OpenShot 4.0 brings these jobs together in a dedicated Color View with a large video preview, clip properties, color wheels, and live video scopes arranged around your footage.You do not need to be a professional colorist to get started. Right-click a video clip and choose Look > Adjust Colors. OpenShot adds the new Color Grade effect, selects it, and opens the tools you need. You can begin with a quick adjustment and learn the more advanced controls at your own pace.Color correction and creative grading in one effectThe new Color Grade effect includes practical controls for exposure, contrast, temperature, tint, highlights, shadows, saturation, and vibrance. These are useful for correcting dark footage, removing a color cast, recovering bright areas, or giving several cameras a more consistent appearance.When you are ready to build a look, the same effect includes separate color wheels for global adjustments, shadows, midtones, and highlights. Push the shadows toward a cooler tone, warm the highlights, or make a small adjustment to skin tones without shifting every part of the image in the same way. Color wheels and editable curves give you precise control over different tonal ranges. Four editable curves provide precise control over the full image and the individual red, green, and blue channels. Curve points and handles can be moved directly, including smooth Bézier adjustments. OpenShot also supports industry-standard .cube LUT files, with an intensity control that lets you blend a LUT into the corrected image instead of applying it at full strength.The complete Color Grade effect is keyframable. Color wheels, curves, correction controls, LUT intensity, and the overall mix can all change over time. That makes it possible to correct lighting that shifts during a shot, animate a stylized color transition, or slowly reveal a finished look.See what your image is really doingA monitor can be misleading. Its brightness, color settings, and the light in your room can all affect what you see. Video scopes show the actual color and brightness information inside the frame.OpenShot 4.0 includes a Luma Waveform, Histogram, RGB Parade, and Vectorscope. The scopes update as you move through the project, so you can check exposure, find clipped highlights, compare color channels, judge saturation, and keep skin tones looking natural. Draw a region over a face, sky, product, or other area to analyze only that part of the frame. Each video scope includes a Region tool. Draw a box over a face, sky, wall, or product and the scope will focus on that part of the image. The Vectorscope also includes a skin-tone reference line, making it easier to spot color casts and keep faces looking believable.For a quicker start, the clip menu includes options such as Auto Contrast, Lift Shadows, Warm Up, and Boost Color. These presets use the same editable Color Grade effect, so they are starting points rather than permanent one-click filters.We also wrote a new color chapter for the OpenShot User Guide. It explains color correction, grading, scopes, skin tones, curves, wheels, and LUTs in plain language.Record Your Screen, Camera, and Voice Inside OpenShotThe new Recording View turns OpenShot into a practical capture and editing workspace. Record a microphone, desktop, webcam, or several sources together without building a separate import workflow first. Choose any combination of microphone, screen, and webcam sources from the new Recording View. Each enabled source is recorded as its own media file and timeline clip. Your microphone stays separate from system audio. Your webcam stays separate from the screen capture. After recording, you can trim a mistake, adjust voice volume, crop the camera, move the picture-in-picture window, or apply effects to one source without changing the others. Recording controls remain close at hand while you preview and edit your project. When screen and webcam recording are combined, OpenShot can automatically place the webcam in a rounded picture-in-picture layout. All of those choices use normal clip properties, so you remain in control after the recording ends.The Recording View provides live feedback before and during a session. You can check the microphone meter, preview the webcam, and watch temporary clips appear on the timeline while recording. OpenShot keeps the sources synchronized and replaces the temporary previews with the completed media when you stop.You can also preview an existing project while recording a microphone or webcam. This is useful for voice-over work, commentary, reaction videos, lessons, and presentations. For an even faster voice-over workflow, right-click a clip and choose Audio > Record. OpenShot moves to the beginning of the clip, opens the recording controls, and chooses a useful track below it.If you want to record several takes before editing, choose No Track. The finished media will be added to Project Files without being placed on the timeline. Recordings are stored in the project's assets folder, which helps keep the source files together with your work.Capture options adapt to the operating system and available hardware. OpenShot supports platform-native recording paths on Windows, macOS, Linux X11, and Linux Wayland with PipeWire. Available screen, window, region, camera, and system-audio options can vary by platform and permissions.10 New Effects for Sound, Style, and MotionOpenShot 4.0 adds ten effects to the underlying video engine. Some solve everyday problems, while others make entirely new creative workflows possible.Turn audio into animated graphicsThe new Audio Visualization effect transforms sound into an animated visual. It can draw waveforms, filled waveforms, bars, radial patterns, spectrum displays, particles, and VU-style meters. Controls for color, rainbow spread, frequency range, channels, detail, glow, background, and visual style make it useful for music videos, podcasts, lyric videos, audio previews, and social media posts. Audio visualization processing performance in OpenShot 4.0. These figures measure the effect itself, not complete project playback or export speed. These visuals are designed to animate smoothly, not simply look good in a still frame. In our performance testing, every visualization mode ran well above common 24, 30, and 60 FPS project rates. Even the most demanding modes exceeded 170 frames per second, while Bars, PhaseScope, and VU Meter processed at more than 1,000 FPS.Beat Sync turns the energy in an audio clip into a color layer that reacts to beats and loud sounds. Adjust the frequency range, threshold, response curve, attack, and release, then composite the result over another video. It is a flexible building block for flashes, rhythmic color changes, and music-driven edits.Add texture, light, and polish Film Grain adds repeatable, animated grain with controls for size, softness, clumping, tonal response, color variation, evolution, and coherence. Ready-made looks include 35mm Fine, 35mm Classic, 35mm Gritty, 16mm Classic, Super 8, and High ISO. Denoise Image reduces luma grain and color speckles while protecting motion and detail. A brightness response curve lets you clean noisy shadows more strongly than highlights. Shadow creates soft drop shadows with adjustable color, distance, angle, blur, spread, and opacity. Glow adds an outer or inner halo around visible pixels. It works especially well with text, logos, transparent images, and masked subjects. Build new visual ideas Displacement Map uses an image or video to warp another clip. Create water ripples, heat haze, refractive glass, mirages, and animated distortions. Timer generates configurable count-up and count-down displays for tutorials, challenges, sports, presentations, and social videos. Color Grade powers the new correction and grading workflow described above. Object Mask creates a reusable animated mask around a selected subject.