A player first, an editor when you want one
Most of the time you want to watch the file, so that is what Reel does by default, with hardware-decoded playback, real audio and video sync, subtitles and frame-exact seeking. Keyboard habits from mpv and VLC work out of the box.
The editor is one button away rather than a separate program with its own import dialog. That is the whole idea: one door for all media.
The timeline
Trim by dragging clip edges, split at the playhead, and move clips with snapping, with undo and redo throughout. Roll, slip and slide trims are there when you need to adjust a cut without disturbing what is around it.
Copy, paste and duplicate with the usual shortcuts, where pasting inserts rather than overwrites. Drop markers to jump between, and save the cut as a project file that reopens with a double-click.
Grading that previews exactly as it renders
Exposure, contrast, saturation and fades apply live. Five-point tone curves per channel bake together with your LUT into a single GPU sample, and any .cube 3D LUT is sampled on the GPU without colouring the letterbox bars.
Power windows limit a grade to an ellipse or rectangle, feathered and invertible, and they can be keyframed so the window follows a subject across the shot. Live scopes are up while you work.
Keyframes, titles and picture-in-picture
Every frame is composed live, so parameters can move: keyframe exposure, colour, zoom, pan and overlay placement with linear, hold or eased curves.
Titles are dragged into place on the picture itself, and both titles and overlays are stored as fractions of the frame. A title composed against a preview lands in the same place whether you export at 720p or 4K.
Sound that behaves itself
There is a volume trim per clip and a music bed under the whole edit that ducks under speech automatically, with no volume curves to draw. The editor mixes every clip, fade and the ducked bed in real time, so you hear the result while you cut.
Clip speed runs from a quarter to four times with the audio pitched to match, and the clip's slot on the timeline resizes to suit so the rest of your cut stays where you put it.
4K without the waiting
Heavy footage gets an automatic background editing proxy that the preview scrubs instead, while exports always use the original. HDR clips are detected and tone-mapped so they look right rather than washed out.
There is nothing to configure and nothing to relink when it finishes.
Export, and the same thing headless
Timeline exports are drawn by Reel's own GPU compositor frame by frame, and ffmpeg only encodes, which is why the preview and the export agree by construction. Markers become real chapters, and social presets deliver the mix at the loudness each platform expects.
Everything the editor does, the command line does too, with no window at all, and project files are plain JSON.
Common questions
Is there a good free video editor for Linux?
Reel is a free, Linux-first editor with the player built in. Open a file, press Edit, and it is on a multi-track timeline with no import step.
Is Reel open source?
Yes. Reel is free and open source under the MIT licence, and the source is on GitHub.
Do I need a powerful machine to edit 4K?
Heavy footage gets an automatic background editing proxy that the preview scrubs, while exports always use the original, so scrubbing stays responsive.
Can I use my own LUTs?
Yes. Any .cube 3D LUT is sampled on the GPU, previewed exactly as it renders, and it never colours the letterbox bars.
Does the preview match the export?
Yes, by construction. Reel's compositor draws the frames for both, and ffmpeg only encodes the result.
Can I drive the editor from a script?
Yes. Everything the editor does runs headless from the command line, projects are plain JSON, and commands speak JSON on request.
Free and open source. Linux-first, with a Windows build too.