alt.hn

7/23/2026 at 3:11:37 PM

Show HN: Palmier Pro – Open-source macOS video editor built for AI

 https://github.com/palmier-io/palmier-pro

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 7:04:06 PM

This looks great! Have you thought about dropping the 'subscription'-part and 'just' selling credits instead?

Here's my thinking as a SaaS founder: when I launch a product, I don't need a video every month. So a monthly pricing makes me do this little calculation every time: "do I need a video this month? nah. Then I'll wait. I lose the early-bird price, but I still net out cheaper." And since there's no yearly option, there's nothing pulling me into the early plan either.

What I would jump on is a launch offer. Something like XXX credits for a good price, enough that it feels like 3 videos over the course of a year. Even if I never use them all (very likely, honestly), I'd buy it. Credits sit there and wait for me, a subscription just quietly bills me for months I don't need it.

Hope that makes sense :)

by Marciplan

7/23/2026 at 7:46:15 PM

It makes sense! We are still early in experimenting the pricing and would want to reduce user's overhead in thinking about pricing/credits as much as possible.

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 9:31:50 PM

I get that too! Rooting for y'all, it looks amazing and I'll definitely grab a month once I have enough ideas enough :)

by Marciplan

7/24/2026 at 12:33:37 AM

Just wanted to chime in to specify that credits are only for the AI generation and built in chat features. The editor is free to use if you connect it to your existing agents!

by Marcosricopeng

7/23/2026 at 10:26:12 PM

then please offer flexibility. I am looking for sth like that , but i want a prepaid based solution and not another sub.

by lmf4lol

7/24/2026 at 2:06:41 AM

I feel the same way too. I also open sourced a video editor. It's free to use and you can buy credits whenever you want to access AI specific features.

by dthedavid

7/24/2026 at 7:13:50 AM

What's the name of it?

by juliangoetze

7/25/2026 at 11:42:17 AM

donkeyuse.com it’s also open sourced

by dthedavid

7/24/2026 at 7:34:59 AM

> Most work in the editing workflow is more mechanical than creative.

I really disagree with this. Maybe once you start producing videos with a formula, it's true. But if you stop to think about it, a lot of things that people consider gruntwork hide little decision in them that subtly influence the creative process.

A lot of tech-minded people don't understand this about art but after editing tens of thousands of photos and over 300 videos, I can't say that there is much mechanical in the process. By automating parts of the process with AI you do hide some of the subtle decisions that might even be subconscious and therefore it still destroys creativity.

I'm sad when someones makes a product like this. Because what happens is that creativity is claimed as something important when really in the long run it is just suppressed for the sake of more efficiency.

I don't expect many people to care to understand this because there's $$$ in front of them and technologically-minded people get a dopamine hit from tech but that's the way it is and you can't hide from that truth. Sooner or later such things as this will be seen as an immense folly.

by vouaobrasil

7/25/2026 at 6:42:22 PM

That's totally fair! I would not want to push you to try out the product, if you're happy with your current editing flow.

We want to make a software that enable more people to be creative with their work, with or without AI. Davinci/Premiere is great software, but for beginners it is still a very high barrier to learn the software.

AI is already used in existing software to help automate parts of editing workflow. One example: Masking an object used to be very mechanical with keyframing, Mocha makes it easier. Now with AI segmentation models, masking anything is much more automated than before. I think that's much more outside of masking that we can just do better.

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 5:09:42 PM

This is what I have been waiting for in order to process my massive action camera library, I will definitely give it a try!

I will start with older standard GoPro videos, and hope that by the time I make it to the Insta360 videos the editor supports 360 video (unless it does already!)

by nsbk

7/23/2026 at 5:14:47 PM

not yet with .360 files. we currently support .mov and .mp4 for videos!

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 6:15:13 PM

I've been following Marcos's youtube channel and it's so great to see that they've finally found their thing. Looks like an awesome product that people actually want. Well done.

by misterchocolat

7/23/2026 at 6:20:52 PM

hey Marcos here - really appreciate it! In hindsight this idea makes so much sense and we're extremely excited to build and make something people want

by Marcosricopeng

7/24/2026 at 4:20:56 AM

From a struggling bootstrapper, could you please elaborate:

> it's so great to see that they've finally found their thing

by hboon

7/24/2026 at 7:11:54 AM

Great project! have you considered giving the agents code-based video rendering like MoviePy or Remotion? Since LLMs are mostly trained on texts and code maybe for edits use code based approach and for complex scenes fallback for seedance, elevenlabs mcp or connectors

by k_dev

7/24/2026 at 8:31:35 AM

Nice! Because the Grok subscription is the cheapest-per-second video offering (that I'm aware of) but doesn't provide API access, I'm often moving between the browser and editor (typically Final Cut).

It feels cheaper by orders of magnitude right now per-second. I'm not sure how long that will continue, but until then, that's pretty important to me, especially when video generation is so imprecise, and thus more of a "rough draft" creative tool than a "final shot" tool.

Quite often my workflow looks like: "Grab this frame from which I'd like a continuation" -> "Upload back to Grok on web" -> "Generate until happy" -> "Download and use".

So a feature request (or I'll just fork next time I'm doing something with AI video) is simply a browser tab alongside the generation tab, literally just to make that window swapping easier, and ideally with 'download' pointing to a sensible location to avoid file replication.

This feels closest to how I use AI video, which is just kind of like an infinitely extensible library tab on my video editing software. I know you said 'no webview' - I don't know Swift well enough to know if that excludes this feature.

There's probably a bunch of ways to improve my specific flow once there's a browser within the UI, especially with MCP integration. Much to consider.

And overall it looks fun, and I'm excited to give it a try. It's great this has beat detection specifically, because that's non-negotiable in a video editor for me when doing AI stuff, as the medium remains more suited to non-dialogue work.

Similarly, the CapCut 'AI video editor' that's most similar to the 'MCP' feature is unusably chaotic, so I'm interested to see how well models do in your architecture. I can understand why you've found structures like 'beat' or 'transcription' massively aid it.

Final Cut export - if it isn't supported by what you've already done (I don't move stuff between editors much!) - is really useful to me personally also.

Best of luck! Excited to test it! Thanks for sharing.

by gabriel666smith

7/24/2026 at 4:35:58 PM

So the main reason for a windows view is to use Grok's subscription over the API correct?

Your exact workflow is what we encountered when making AI videos ourselves! In the editor, you can grab "screenshots" of specific moments of the video you can then use as first frame for another AI video, without the need to re-upload and download all again. Every generation is automatically downloaded and lives locally in your project.

And we export XML to Final Cut if you ever need to finish the project in a familiar editor. Excited to hear your thoughts!

by Marcosricopeng

7/24/2026 at 5:02:53 PM

>So the main reason for a windows view is to use Grok's subscription over the API correct?

Yeah, spot on. I literally wrote a Chrome extension to download -> grab last frame -> navigate -> reupload as new start frame, lol.

But - honestly - unclear how long video models will remain subsidised via subscriptions used in a browser or app, so I don't 100% know that it's a feature worth your time building.

>In the editor, you can grab "screenshots" of specific moments of the video you can then use as first frame for another AI video

Oh awesome! That's really great. I feel like such a moron lazily dragging the "screenshot" tool around Final Cut right now. Genuinely sick feature. Excited to use next time I'm doing stuff with video.

by gabriel666smith

7/24/2026 at 9:36:05 PM

Great - do let us know how it goes!

by Marcosricopeng

7/24/2026 at 2:04:24 AM

Nice project. I’m building a similar project. It’s open source too.

https://github.com/DonkeyUseCorp/Donkey

It’s mostly a web app with a native swift companion app to access local resources like TTS, file storage and video rendering.

I arrived at the same conclusion as you; every app should have AI chat. Just give it full access to the app like a real user. I found that users prefer talking to the AI when editing vs clicking around.

by dthedavid

7/25/2026 at 11:44:17 AM

Donkey is slick. Love the minimal UI.

Edit: Having played with both a bit, and with no disrespect to OP, yours is a significantly better product.

by scoot

7/25/2026 at 6:44:27 PM

no disrespect taken :) What's something that we can do better?

by harrisontin

7/25/2026 at 11:14:52 AM

> Donkey Vision — a screen-understanding API that turns any screenshot into structured, clickable UI, so you can build computer-use tools of your own.

Not faulting your (necessary given today's reality) work, but sad to think that the Amiga still remains ahead of it's time some 36 years later (since ARexx was bundle with the OS), or closer to 40 years if you count when v1 was released separately.

ARexx allowed any application that supported it (and most productivity apps worth their salt did) to communicate with each other, and to be scripted - essentially a standardised API for applications.

We're slowly getting there (at least for SaaS apps) with MCP, but screen scraping shouldn't ever have been necessary.

by scoot

7/24/2026 at 7:33:06 PM

[dead]

by koladev32

7/24/2026 at 5:39:48 PM

Palmier team ftw. Great execution. I love editing videos like this

I remember playing with claude to try and generate videos (or tools to generate videos) a year ago. I never reached something like this, and I think the models were already capable back then.

by filipeisho

7/24/2026 at 9:37:03 PM

Let's go! We're at a point where models are smart enough and generation models are good enough where a product like things finally makes sense. Exciting times!

by Marcosricopeng

7/23/2026 at 4:48:54 PM

Seems super convenient! I spent yesterday trying to edit a simple video for a project by hand and it was not a fun experience! Will check it out!

by didriksg

7/23/2026 at 4:55:56 PM

please try it out! Would love to learn more where agent helps you and fails you

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 6:42:56 PM

I assume using Swift means cross-platform support is tertiary at best?

I have mostly Macs in my workflow so not an issue for me, but its good to have that plainly stated if so.

Being able to edit a long video to pull out different speakers segments automatically or do automatic edits of speaker transitions would be great- I'll give it a try and see what scenarios are best suited for our use cases...

by mrkstu

7/23/2026 at 7:44:49 PM

Yes currently its only macOS support.

Long videos with different speakers is a core use case that we are trying to optimize for, please let us know how it goes for you!

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 5:51:21 PM

Love seeing real native apps (vs electron hogs), starred. For heavy lifting and easier cross platform, Rust-based Crux is pretty cool, I'm experimenting with it now: https://github.com/redbadger/crux

by cpursley

7/23/2026 at 5:12:30 PM

I don't work with video but this seems very nice, and your promo video is wonderful. Great work!

by draw_down

7/23/2026 at 6:04:40 PM

Thank you! We're trying to make video editing accessible to everyone

by Marcosricopeng

7/23/2026 at 6:59:04 PM

Love to see it. We have been experimenting with https://github.com/ronak-create/FableCut, how is this similar? How is it different?

by adenta

7/23/2026 at 7:53:44 PM

I have not heard of FableCut, but looks like an interesting project!

It's similar in a sense that we're both exposing a mcp server to let claude runs editing tools, and also a traditional video editor interface.

It's different in terms of how you run it. FableCut requires you to install node, ffmpeg, and run a local server and connect to it via Chromium-based browser, whereas Palmier Pro is a native Mac App.

I don't know enough about the feature parity to comment on it. How is your experience with FableCut?

by harrisontin

7/23/2026 at 8:09:07 PM

[dead]

by adenta

7/24/2026 at 7:56:53 PM

Good to hear that!!

by ronak_parmar

7/24/2026 at 9:53:52 AM

I really detest video. Its time based, needs rendering, takes up a lot of space… oh yeah has sound. Making a one minute recap of some footage takes me like 5 hours and I am still not satisfied. Will try this out!

by thenthenthen

7/24/2026 at 5:57:42 AM

[flagged]

by wayknow

7/24/2026 at 7:42:21 AM

[flagged]

by guesswho01