The free, open-source video editor shipped version 4.0 on August 30, 2026 — a screen/webcam/audio recording view, a full color-grading workspace, ten new effects, and an offline AI masking tool, on top of a rebuilt native Qt timeline.
2026-08-31 · by Moe Ameen
Published 2026-08-31 · Updated
Short answer
OpenShot 4.0 is a major release of the free, open-source video editor, out on August 30, 2026 for Windows, macOS and Linux. It adds a Recording View that captures screen, webcam, mic and system audio to separate tracks, and a Color View with wheels, curves, .cube LUTs and scopes. It also brings ten new effects, including an Object Mask that runs offline, plus a rebuilt native Qt timeline.
Key takeaways
OpenShot released version 4.0.0 on August 30, 2026. OpenShot remains completely free and open-source under the GPL (v3 or later), with no subscription, cloud account, or per-seat license for its core features. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux (including Wayland with PipeWire), and the release notes mention early Android compatibility groundwork that is not yet an officially supported platform.
The headline addition is a Recording View that captures screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio from inside the editor, with a live preview during capture. Each source is recorded to its own track so footage, voice, webcam, and system sound stay independently editable afterward — a genuine shift for tutorial, demo, and reaction workflows that previously needed a separate capture tool.
Alongside it is a new Color View and Color Grade effect: color wheels for shadows, midtones, highlights, and global; editable Bézier curves; support for industry-standard .cube LUT files; professional scopes (Luma Waveform, Histogram, RGB Parade, Vectorscope) with a region-analysis tool; and quick presets like Auto Contrast, Lift Shadows, Warm Up, and Boost Color.
The release adds ten new effects in total, the notable one being Object Mask — machine-learning subject selection and tracking that runs entirely on your own computer via free, downloadable ONNX models (YOLO, EfficientSAM, Cutie). It needs no AI account, no subscription, and uploads nothing to the cloud, and its output is reusable as a mask source for other effects.
The other nine include Audio Visualization, Beat Sync, Film Grain, Denoise, Shadow, Glow, Displacement Map, Timer, and the Color Grade effect above. Under the hood, the web-component timeline was replaced with a fully native Qt engine (smoother zoom, editable timecode in the ruler, clearer keyframe menus), and OpenShot reports measured speed-ups such as a 61.8% faster Blur effect. The release also ships modern export presets for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.
Verify any specific spec against the official announcement and release notes at openshot.org before quoting it — feature availability can vary by operating system, and the recording paths in particular differ per platform.
OpenShot 4.0 is where the raw video gets made — you record the screen and webcam, cut it on the native timeline, and grade it with the new color tools until the master looks right. What OpenShot hands you at the end is one exported file. Getting that single video to earn its keep across every platform, in every format your audience actually watches, is the job Kompozy picks up. Drop the OpenShot export into Kompozy as source and it becomes the input for a full release rather than a one-and-done upload.
From that one graded master, Kompozy fans out: Clipped Shorts pull the strongest vertical moments into standalone cuts, each auto-captioned and reframed to 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9; a Persona Short or HeyGen avatar can narrate the takeaway on camera; and the same idea spins into a Carousel, Quote Graphics, a Blog Article, and an Email Newsletter — all written under one Persona Brief so a batch built from a single edit still reads as one brand. Then Autopilot schedules and publishes it across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. OpenShot does the craft of the edit for free; Kompozy turns that finished edit into a repeatable, multi-format, published cadence — the part a desktop editor was never built to do.
A real listicle video made in the Kompozy workspace, shown as an example of the format. It was not made about this story.
Best for:
Not ideal for:
OpenShot 4.0.0 was released on August 30, 2026. It is completely free and open-source under the GPL (v3 or later), with no subscription or cloud account required for its core features, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
A built-in Recording View that captures screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio to separate editable tracks; a new Color View and Color Grade effect with color wheels, Bézier curves, .cube LUT support, and professional scopes; ten new effects including a local AI Object Mask; and a rebuilt native Qt timeline with measured performance gains.
No. The Object Mask effect runs entirely on your own computer using free, downloadable ONNX models (YOLO, EfficientSAM, Cutie). It requires no AI account or subscription and uploads nothing to the cloud.
No. OpenShot is a desktop editor — it records, edits, grades, and exports a video file, and 4.0 adds export presets sized for platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It does not clip, reframe, schedule, or publish across platforms. To turn an OpenShot export into captioned clips, carousels, and posts published everywhere, pair it with a content engine like Kompozy.
We checked every figure, date, quote and product claim on this page against the sources listed below on 2026-10-23, and removed or rewrote anything we could not confirm. Every OpenShot feature, platform, model name and speed figure comes from OpenShot's own release post. Kompozy plan and product details come from kompozy.io/pricing.
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