CHANGELOG

What’s new.

Every build, in plain language. These are the versions that have been built and tested - neither app has reached its store yet, so nothing below is downloadable today. It is published anyway, because how a tool got here is worth seeing before you trust it with your footage.

Zella for Mac is coming to the Mac App Store; Zella for iPhone is coming to the App Store. Leave your email and we will tell you the moment either one lands. Updates stay free within the major version.

viOS 1.0 2026-08-16

Make it Viral comes to iPhone, and Auto-Polish finally keeps its promises

Make it Viral is on the phone. It sits directly under Auto-Polish in the Auto sheet and runs the same pass plus the two bold layers Auto-Polish deliberately leaves out: a colour pop that skips itself if you have already graded a clip, and matched sound effects under the strongest cuts only. It keeps your aspect ratio, has its own applied state and its own Revert, so the two one-taps can never undo each other
Auto-Polish really does remove the noise now. The finished voice render was being thrown away every single run: the file carried a fingerprint of the whole timeline including music, and Auto-Polish adds its music bed four steps AFTER it polishes the voice - so by the end the fingerprint no longer matched and the player quietly fell back to the raw microphone while the app said the voice was polished. The fingerprint now covers only what the voice render is actually made from
Silence removal removes the silences. A safety check compared every detected pause against the transcript and threw the whole pause away if any word overlapped it - and word endings routinely overhang a real pause by a second or more, so most genuine silences survived. It now trims around the word instead of surrendering the pause: nothing under a spoken word is ever cut, and the dead air on either side of it goes
Remove Noise and Polish Voice run on Apple’s Voice Isolation engine, the same one Final Cut Pro uses for its Voice Isolation slider. Both can also be applied to a single selected clip instead of the whole video, so one noisy take can be cleaned without touching the rest
Waveforms show what you will actually hear. The timeline drew the raw recording even when a denoised version was playing, so a cleaned clip still showed its old noise, and a near-silent clip drew speech-like spikes with nothing behind them. Every clip now draws from the audio that is really playing, and a genuinely silent clip finally looks silent instead of full
Zooming can no longer trim your clips. A pinch finger landing on a trim handle started a real trim and committed it when the gesture ended, so clips collapsed or pulled back footage you had already cut. Trim handles are one-finger only now, they refuse to start while a zoom is happening, and a trim interrupted by a zoom rolls back exactly instead of sticking
The canvas says what it is doing. Background removal and voice renders used to leave the preview black and silent with no explanation; now the canvas shows what is running. And because a live background is segmented on every frame while you play, the preview can drift behind the audio - so the canvas says so, and says the exported video stays in sync, which it does
Animate writes the motion even if you only move the slider. Setting a start point and then changing Scale or Position without moving the playhead used to do nothing at all and leave the tool silently armed - it now animates over a one-second window from the point you set
Three new title looks: Gold Title, the gold-gradient thumbnail headline; Story Card, a serif line on a soft card that fills the frame; and Beast Pop, Anton caps running white into gold with a deep shadow
Colour looks stop being shades of each other. Every pair in the catalogue was measured for real visual difference and eight looks were retuned until each one earns its name - Golden Hour has actual gold in it now, Skin Warm is warm. The check runs on every build
The whole first run was redesigned. The welcome screen opens with three tilted cards showing what the app actually does rather than a logo on black, each setup question has its own colour and animation, and the home screen carries a colour per capability instead of one grey stripe

viOS 1.0 2026-08-05

The submission build: a transition that was secretly another one, a voice fix that never ran, and iPhone-only

Recordings are crash-safe while they happen. Camera recordings on every Mac, and all recordings on Apple Silicon, are written in one-second checkpoints - a crash, force-quit or power loss mid-take loses at most the final second, and the relaunch offers the rescued take ready to edit. Verified the hard way: kill the app mid-recording and the take opens with picture and sound aligned
Record without leaving the editor. A Record button lives in the editor top bar, and an empty canvas offers Record a Video right on the card - beginners kept hunting for a way to record their first clip and only found import paths
The Library is the front door. Click the Dock icon and the Library opens: every recording and project, newest first, named like Today 2:26 am instead of Zella_20260807_022625. It was always there; now you cannot miss it
Style a single word. Select any line or word inside a title and the font, size and colour apply to just the selection - mix a giant word into a small sentence and the canvas renders exactly what the box previews
Fonts you choose with your eyes. The font control is a gallery where every family renders its own name in its own typeface, favourites float first, and the pick applies live
Transitions preview like footage. Every tile shows a real mid-transition frame - a golden-hour shot handing over to a night scene - so the grid reads as motion, not 26 identical chips, and the whole catalog now shows without a More button
Switching cameras actually switches. Picking your iPhone or webcam sometimes changed the label and not the picture - the capture session could quietly hold two cameras and keep feeding from the old one. It cannot any more, the picker tells you while an iPhone is connecting, and a camera that sends black video says so instead of showing silent darkness
The recording panel stopped eating a slow Mac. Opening the picker used to cost up to 90% CPU on a two-core Intel - a per-buffer meter update was re-rendering the whole panel ~43 times a second. Measured after the fix: about 5%, with the camera preview live
A crash at the exact moment recording starts is fixed. The capture engine rebuilds its graph from the main thread on its own schedule, and our configuration ran elsewhere; with a live iPhone stream the two could interleave into a crash. All session configuration now shares one thread - four rapid start-stop cycles that used to kill the app now pass clean
The Stop bar stays where you can find it. Recording a region parks the toolbar just outside your selected area - or pinned inside its bottom edge when the region fills the screen - instead of a corner unrelated to where you are looking
The Clips tab grew up. Uniform tiles that no aspect ratio can break, sharp thumbnails, duration badges, newest first, and human names - with the raw filename one hover away
Plain words everywhere. The Titles tab is now Text, Callouts is now Arrows, and playhead is gone from every label in favour of the current position - nothing was removed, only renamed for people who have never edited video before
Luma Fade is a luma fade. It shared a code path with Cross Dissolve, so a transition with its own name, icon and category in a 25-item catalogue produced a byte-identical result to a different one. It now does what the name means: the outgoing frame’s own brightness drives the wipe, so highlights burn through first and shadows hold on last
Polish Voice sounds like it should. The chain picked its noise-gating from a flag that stopped meaning "denoise ran" when the denoise cache landed, so on every real take it silently took the fallback settings meant for when denoising FAILED — a blunt gate of the kind that used to eat syllables. The gentler, take-adaptive path it was supposed to use had been dead code for weeks
The magnifier callout has a zoom control. The strength was stored, saved and honoured by the renderer, and nothing could change it, so every magnifier sat at 2x forever
Imported videos open on the right canvas. A landscape import was forced onto a 9:16 vertical canvas, so the first thing you did was undo a crop nobody asked for. Both recording paths already detected the shape; import was the one that never did
"Remove download" actually frees the space. Deleting the ~150 MB captions model set nothing to say you meant it, and the auto-resume added for interrupted downloads treated a missing model as an interrupted one — so backgrounding the app once pulled all of it straight back
Denying Photos access is no longer a dead end. You got the words "Photos access denied" and no way to act on them, next to a finished video you could not save. It now names the exact Settings path and offers the jump, like the camera and microphone prompts always have
Import failures in the editor stop happening in silence. Adding media from the editor could fail completely — an iCloud file that never downloaded, an unsupported codec, a full disk — and the sheet would simply close as if nothing had happened
The recorder tells you why it stopped. When storage filled or the camera died mid-take, the reason was written to a banner on the screen that was closing in the same instant, so the recorder just vanished and you landed in the editor holding a short take with no explanation
Restore Purchases in Settings says what happened. It ran a full round trip and showed nothing either way, so a customer whose purchase came back and one who owned nothing saw the same blank result
No more phantom "no screen recording arrived". Opening the screen-record screen and closing it without recording left the app waiting for a recording that was never started, which surfaced twenty minutes later as a failure report for something you never did
Ready-made titles work in landscape. Tapping one tried to close a panel that is docked, not presented, so the panel stayed open on top of the title you had just added
Smaller phones stop clipping. On an iPhone SE the editor’s total-duration counter lost its last digits to the screen edge and the toolbar’s last tool lost its icon; the callout sliders also stopped filing one undo entry per pixel of drag
VoiceOver can name the buttons. The recorder’s close and camera-switch, the microphone toggle, and every delete and mute button in the editor announced only their icon name or nothing at all. The purchase screen was worse: mid-purchase it went silent while its buttons stayed tappable
Pro Week can no longer be restarted by moving the clock backwards, and the free 2-minute export limit is now enforced where the video is actually rendered rather than only at the button
Now an iPhone app, on iOS 18 or later. It still installs and runs on iPad, in iPhone compatibility mode, but it is no longer sold as an iPad app — a stretched phone layout on a big screen is worse than an honest one, and iPad deserves its own. Raising the floor to iOS 18 costs no devices: iOS 18 supports exactly the same iPhones as iOS 17

vMac 1.0 2026-08-07

A way out of every long job, two voice fixes that cancel each other out, and playback that stops fighting the editor

Cancel on every long job. Captions, Remove Noise, Polish Voice, the cleanup scan, Make Vertical and Keep Face Centered all show a Cancel while they run, and none of them leaves a half-applied edit behind: the transcript you had comes back, the voice toggles roll back to whatever actually produced the audio on your timeline, and the reframe restores the Fit or Fill it changed on the way in
Reset All Edits. One action at the foot of the sidebar that clears the canvas shape, cuts, trims, effects, captions, callouts, titles, transitions, zooms, speed regions and audio processing, behind a dialog that names exactly what is going. It never touches your clips or your media, because removing edits is not removing footage, and one Cmd-Z puts all of it back. The only Reset All before this was scoped to colour, so a project that picked up a vertical crop days ago had no way home
A recording that lost its audio now says so instead of saving silently broken. A long take once saved with no audio track because every gate on the stop path checked intent rather than the artifact. There is now a watchdog six seconds in that checks samples are really reaching the writer, a matching watchdog on the camera bubble, and a save-time gate that re-opens the finished file and verifies the audio track actually exists before the recording is called good
Record Voiceover records from the microphone you picked - the same device as the recorder - and the voiceover panel has its own mic picker. It used to capture whatever the system default happened to be, no matter what the recorder was set to
Canvas backdrops are draggable timeline blocks. Drop one at a cut and it inserts as a real full-frame segment - solid colour, animated, image or video
Three one-click creator title looks: Gold Impact, a gold gradient on a rough brush slab with a black outline; Story Card, a serif on a soft white card; and Beast Pop, a white and gold two-tone with a heavy outline. Gradient titles can sit on plates now, and outlines render under gradients and colours instead of swallowing them
The on-canvas transform box (⌘T) works on every platform canvas, not just Original, and it transforms the selected clip when one is selected
Library clips drag straight onto the timeline, and a dragged screen-plus-camera recording brings its camera bubble along
Paste understands where it lands. Pasting at a cut inserts the clip; pasting mid-clip lands it as an overlay with its own volume lane
Auto-align lip-sync, measured per recording. It compares mouth motion against the voice on the actual take and applies the offset it finds, and it refuses outright when the correlation is too weak to trust rather than guessing
Thirteen new sound effects, for 43 in all, still synthesized on the device: Reverse Whoosh, Tape Stop, Rewind, Page Turn, Censor Beep, Bubble Pop, Typewriter, Success, Reverse Cymbal, Fail, Cash Register, Applause and Crickets
Clips thumbnails pick a bright, representative frame instead of the camera's black priming frame, so a camera take stops showing up as a black tile
Remove Noise was turning the volume down, not the noise. It really was removing the noise, and it took 7.8 dB of your voice with it, which by ear is indistinguishable from doing nothing. Worse, the harder you pushed the slider the quieter the result, so turning it up felt like turning it off. Both engines now restore the speech to the level it came in at, so the separation the model won is audible as noise reduction rather than as attenuation
Polish Voice after Remove Noise was spending the denoise it had just been handed. A compressor attenuates speech and leaves the noise bed alone, and the makeup gain then lifts both, so every dB of compression is a dB given back to the noise. On a real take it returned less separation than the untouched file. The compressor now works to a budget measured from your own recording: same loudness, and the noise floor lands 12.7 dB lower
Playback stopped starving the editor. On a 31 minute recording with a camera bubble the main thread was 92.9 to 96.8% busy while playing, and the sidebar would not scroll at all. The playhead now has its own clock, so only the parts of the screen that draw it redraw, and on slower GPUs it coalesces instead of forcing a redraw on every tick. Measured after: 7.5% busy, and the sidebar scrolls while the video plays
Every job says how much longer it has to go, scaled to the length of your clip. The learned figure was a single number per button, so denoising a 7 second take taught it "5 seconds" and it then promised 5 seconds for a 30 minute one
Remove Fillers stops reporting a clean take when it actually declined to run, wherever you ask for it. A scan that wants to cut more than a fifth of the video is failing to understand the speaker rather than finding filler, so it refuses; the sheet used to show a green tick and 'No filler words found' regardless, which read as a dead feature, and asking the assistant to remove fillers gave the same misleading answer. Both now say why it stopped and point at the caption language, which is the usual cause. The scan is also harder to trip by accident: it counts only the cuts it would really make, so an ordinary English take with a few sentence-opening words is no longer refused
8K export really encodes 8K, on every route. Measured across every tier on one timeline: 4K asked for 3840x2160 and got it, and 8K asked for 7680x4320 and also got 3840x2160. A tier you pay for was quietly producing 4K. It now routes through an encoder that can carry it, including the case that used to slip through: a single clip with no cuts, which took a faster path that had no such encoder
A clip you import and drop at the very start of the timeline is in the export. The export window was being shifted past it, so the preview played it and the file never contained it
Object effects. Click an object in the frame and give it an outline, glow, scribble, glitter, blur or spotlight. The mask is found for you, and re-found from the point you clicked on every refresh, so it survives the object moving rather than drifting onto whatever is nearby
Tracked overlays. Point a callout at a moving object and it follows, tracked on the device with Vision. The blur, pixelate, glitch and magnifier regions follow the same path, so a blur you place once stays on the thing you meant to hide. It fails honestly: if the lock is lost it stops rather than smearing across the frame
Callouts are editable on the canvas. Every callout drags, the region kinds get a resize grip, the selection draws a frame so you can see what is picked, and the text-bearing kinds open an editor on double-click. Leader lines were the last holdout: the one callout whose entire content is its label could only be retyped from the sidebar, and its target dot could not be aimed at all
Strong Open: one action for the three edits that decide whether anyone stays past the first seconds. The video opens punched in at 1.3x and settles, your own first spoken line becomes a hook title, and any quiet stretch longer than six seconds gets a shallow drift. The title is never invented, so no transcript means no title. It declines outright on a take where the subject is already moving a lot, because stacking motion on motion reads as seasickness
Auto B-Roll works with no API key. It used to read your captions, find it had nothing to fetch, and stop. It now draws designed keyword cards locally from those captions instead. They are labelled as keyword cards and never presented as stock footage, and the status line tells you how to add a free key if you would rather have filmed shots
Auto-Transitions places transitions on a single continuous take. Refusing same-source joins is a sensible bias, but on one-take footage every join is same-source, so the button did nothing at all; when the strict pass comes back empty it now places a restrained set at the widest-spaced joins
Make Vertical keeps you in frame when it cannot find a face. It looked for faces only and fell back to a dead-centre crop, which throws away anyone standing off to one side. It now falls through to your body, then to whatever the shot itself draws the eye to, and the status line names which of the three framed you
Pop, as a background style for the camera bubble. Replacing a bubble background is a cutout, and every imperfection in the matte shows up as a halo or a fringe. Pop keeps you sharp over your own background blurred and dimmed, so both layers are the same pixels and a soft edge crossfades instead of haloing
Seven new colour looks, the 2026 creator pack: Soft Glow, Bright Airy, Peachy, Terra Brown, Retro Halation, Tokyo Soft and Punchy, for 43 in the free set. And the dark corner shading that crept onto portrait videos is gone: the vignette now follows the frame's diagonal instead of its short side, only the five dark-identity looks carry one at all, and a pixel-measuring selftest holds every look to it
Cmd-A then Delete removes everything you selected. A counter was being decremented twice per pass, so ten selected pieces deleted five, and on a project that had already had its silences cut it deleted three
A clip with no person in it stops going entirely blurred. Background removal returns an empty matte for a screen recording or a product shot, and the compositor then painted the chosen background over every pixel. It now measures how much subject the matte actually found and leaves the clip alone below 2%
The transition picker shows the transition. All 25 cards render a frozen mid-transition scene composed for their own type, instead of 25 identical chips
Beat Sync respects the drum you pick. The segmented control only chose which sensitivity slider you were editing while all three bands stayed live, so picking Kick still punched on the hats
The upgrade sheet has a way out. Presented from Export it had no window chrome and no dismiss control at all; it now has an X wired to Esc, and a Maybe Later
The sidebar tab is called "Auto", not "AI". These rows are deterministic automations, so calling them AI oversold them and left the Assistant, which is the actual AI surface, sounding like something else
The greeting names your plan: Free, Pro, Founder, or Pro Week with the days remaining. Your tier was previously only discoverable by hitting a gate, which is the worst possible moment to learn it
Your project cannot be deleted by repairing it. Pointing a project back at a file that had not actually moved could remove the project record instead of relinking it, and the project did not come back.
Turning the camera off means off. With Camera switched off, a screen recording still wrote a full webcam video beside it and kept the camera light on for the whole take.
Screen recordings keep their sound when the camera is blocked. If macOS had denied camera access, a screen and microphone recording came out completely silent, with nothing on screen to say why.
Colour looks and trims are remembered. A project whose only edits were a look and a trim could be overwritten by an empty canvas, and transform keyframes, scene switches, the voice changer and reframe settings were never written to disk at all.
Cut Empty Space will not eat a whole take. A muted microphone or the wrong input made the entire recording read as silence, and the review sheet offered a single pre-ticked row that removed everything.
Remove Fillers stops cutting real words. It reached across gaps in the transcript to find the end of a pause, and a gap is not always silence.
Auto-Zoom Clicks is undoable. It replaced every zoom on the timeline, including a Strong Open and any you had placed yourself, and Cmd-Z could not bring them back.
Beat Sync and object effects reach the export. A beat punch was dropped from the whole file as soon as any transition existed, and object effects only rendered when some unrelated effect happened to be on.
Full screen records your screen's shape. Any display that is not 16:9 was padded to fit, and anything above 1080p was scaled down.
Recording on a second monitor works. A capture region dragged to another display could record nothing at all, and screenshots could come from the wrong screen.
Cmd-Z in a text field undoes your typing, not your timeline. It also works again in every other text field in the app, including Library search.
Opening a second project while the first is minimised no longer leaves the editor menus pointing at a window that is not there.
Pro Week can use what it offers. During the free week the app offered 4K and long exports and then refused to render them, while the banner promised everything Pro.
Restore Purchases tells the truth. It reported success even when nothing had been restored.
Make it Viral runs all of itself, every time. Applying it, removing it and applying it again silently skipped the colour grade, the pacing cuts and the sound effects, and switched ducking off, while still reporting that it had done all of them. The grade also lands on the whole video rather than one selected piece.
The music bed no longer stacks a second copy each time a project is reopened, sound effects stop doubling, and a saved look no longer switches ducking on with nothing to duck.
Instagram recordings open on the shape you framed. A 4:5 recording opened on a 9:16 canvas, so the first thing you did was undo a crop nobody asked for.
Files Zella lists in the clip browser can be dropped on the timeline. Several image and audio types were accepted in one place and refused in the other.
The export queue and the region quality chip do what they say. The queue wrote three identically framed files for some formats and dropped your Pro format choices, and the 720p / 1080p / 4K chip on the region picker was not read by anything.
The assistant stops claiming success it did not have. Adding music, images or a bubble background now say when they did not work, it can reach every background including Pop and Ash, and it will not treat your voiceover as background music when asked to remove or re-level the music.
Hardening. Zella is stricter about files it did not write: a malformed colour LUT can no longer bring the app down, project packages resolve their media inside the package, and the recovery journal only ever removes its own files. Stock provider keys are no longer written into the shared network cache.

viOS 1.0 2026-08-07

Zella 1.0 for iPhone: every control in plain English

Effects no longer darken you. Eleven looks carried a built-in vignette, and the renderer aimed it by the narrow side of the frame - so on a 9:16 selfie the shading started on your shoulders, and no amount of switching effects removed the ring. Bright and neutral looks now carry zero vignette, the five deliberately dark looks shade the corners only gently, and an automated corner test on a portrait frame keeps it that way on every build
Seven new looks, built from what creators actually run in 2026: Soft Glow, Bright Airy, Peachy, Terra Brown, Retro Halation, Tokyo Soft and Punchy. Every one lifts - the catalogue is now 42 looks in the free tier, 45 with the Founder grades
The words on the buttons are the words you know. Callouts is now Arrows & Labels, Overlays is Picture-in-Picture, Reframe is Resize, Speed & Retime is just Speed, Transform is Size & Position, and "Auto-duck under voice" literally says "Music gets quieter when you talk". Where a pro term is worth learning it rides along in parentheses - Custom color look (LUT), Show part of the clip (mask) - so you pick up the vocabulary without needing it first
Captions has its own footer button. The most-used feature was hiding behind the word Studio; the footer now reads Split, Delete, Captions, Text, Audio, with Effects, Speed, Studio and Add scrolling in from the right. Generate captions is the first thing on its tab instead of sitting below the settings
The buttons that matter carry their names. Export says Export instead of being a share glyph, the new-project button says New, fullscreen close says Close, and every footer tool sits on one straight baseline
Every delete tells you the way back: "Deleted - tap Undo to bring it back". The Undo it names is the labelled button in the top bar, and it covers clips, captions, text, sounds, music and transitions alike
The app teaches itself, once. One-time tips appear at the right moment - drag the yellow edges to trim, drag your text on the video to move it - each dismissed with a tap on Got it, never shown again, and never on top of a problem message
A font showcase you can judge by looking: 51 faces in a grid of cards, each drawing a big Aa in the face itself, grouped Sans / Viral / Display / Handwritten / Serif / Script / Mono, with long-press to star favourites. Five viral faces ship inside the app - Fjalla One, Archivo Black, Bangers, Luckiest Guy, Marker Pro - so they render with nothing to download
The Lyric title look: condensed caps with one line chipped in teal and a typewriter entrance. Highlight 2nd line only chips a single line of a multi-line title, and your own line breaks stay exactly where you typed them
Seven new colour looks, the 2026 creator pack: Soft Glow, Bright Airy, Peachy, Terra Brown, Retro Halation, Tokyo Soft and Punchy, for 42 in the free set. And the dark corner shading that crept onto portrait videos is gone: the vignette now follows the frame's diagonal instead of its short side, and only the five dark-identity looks carry one at all
Typing a text and tapping Done keeps what you typed. Done used to discard the text unless you found Save first, which is not a thing anyone should have to learn
When an export finishes you cannot miss it: a green banner up top, and the sheet scrolls itself to the finished card with the tick, the file size and the share row
Text blocks on the timeline trim like everything else now - grips at both ends, visible whether or not the block is selected, with a finger-sized touch area instead of a seven-point target
If a video file goes missing, the message says what to do in one line - "We can't find this video's file. Tap Relink and pick it again" - and spans the screen instead of squeezing into the canvas

viOS 0.6 & Mac 0.7 2026-08-05

A teleprompter, a timeline you edit with your fingers, and sixteen music beds

Record a voiceover while the video plays. Narrating to picture is the entire job of a voiceover tool, and there was no preview in the sheet at all - so the only play button was the editor's, behind it, and pressing it dismissed the sheet and threw away the take. The video now rolls inside the sheet: muted on the speaker so your microphone cannot record it back, audible if you have headphones in. A stray tap can no longer cancel a take, and a call or an alarm mid-recording keeps what you had already said instead of silently truncating it
Voice effects on a recorded voiceover. Any of the 16 voice changers applies to the take, and because every effect renders from the untouched original they replace each other rather than stacking - so "None" gives you back exactly what you recorded
Muting the original audio works again. Dragging a clip's volume to zero did nothing once you had used any voice tool on the project: the polished audio took a different path through the export that had no volume stage at all, so the control was live, saved, and completely ignored
Teleprompter while you record. Write your script once, and it scrolls over the camera preview as you speak. You set the pace in WORDS PER MINUTE, not an abstract speed dial, and the scroll is timed to the script's real height so it finishes exactly when you do. It starts collapsed, because most takes are unscripted, and the script never appears in your video
Record straight into the timeline you are editing. Add a clip mid-edit without leaving your project, losing your place or starting a second one
Pinch to zoom on both cameras. The 0.5x/1x/2x buttons swap the physical lens, which is a different thing; continuous zoom simply did not exist. Double-tap returns to 1x
Drag either end of anything on the timeline. Stickers, titles, music beds and picture-in-picture clips all trim from both sides now, with grips you can see. Previously only the right edge moved, and only on some blocks - a picture-in-picture had no length control at all
Transitions are visible and editable on the timeline. They were being drawn underneath the clips, so a placed transition looked like nothing happened. Tap one to select it, drag it to another cut, or hold to delete
Auto-Transitions works on a single unbroken recording, which is what most people have. It cut the take and then declined to transition any of it, because the rules that keep Auto-Polish tasteful were also being applied to a button you pressed on purpose
Sixteen music beds, up from ten, in the genres short-form actually runs on: phonk, amapiano, drill, desi pop, an emotional piano bed for storytime, and bossa. Composed for Zella, so they are genuinely royalty-free - no attribution line in your video, no track licence to chase, and they work with no network
Hear any sound or bed before you place it. Tap to audition, + to apply. Music used to drop straight onto the timeline unheard
The Mac colour catalogue caught up with the phone, and went one further. It had been 25 looks since launch while the rebuilt set shipped on iPhone in iOS 0.5; it is now 36. Six of those are Studio grades built around the person rather than the palette - skin exposure lifted a touch, highlight rolloff so faces never clip, pop from skin-safe vibrance rather than saturation - and every older look was retuned in display space at the same time, which is what fixed the dull, dark result the same overhaul fixed on the phone. The 3 Founder grades are untouched, so the catalogue runs to 39 in total, one more than the iPhone
A tool panel can no longer cover your video. Every panel in the editor footer opens at a height that leaves the canvas on screen, the canvas resizes to share the space, and the editor stays live behind it - so you can scrub and move the playhead without closing anything
A richer sticker tray: searchable and categorised, so "fire", "money" or "laugh" find the right thing. It stays on-device, which means it still works with no signal
Titles, reorganised. The tab opened on the full-screen card composer with "add a title" below the fold; it now leads with adding text, then one-tap looks, with the long styling stack folded away and grouped by what each control is for

viOS 0.5 2026-08-02

Colour rebuilt from scratch, captions that admit what they cannot do, and a matte that stops tearing

Colour looks rebuilt, not tweaked. Every preset was crushing the midtones because grading ran in CoreImage's linear space while every published recipe is written for display space. The tone stage is now bracketed back into sRGB and the whole catalogue was re-derived from current colourist sources - so a look finally lands where its recipe says it should
35 colour looks on iPhone, up from 25, plus the 3 Founder grades for 38 in total. Four new archetypes: Portra 400, Clean Cream, Y2K Digicam and Espresso. The free set only grew - nothing moved behind a tier
A test suite now guards the catalogue: mid-grey can never darken, whites stay white, and colour cannot wash out. A preset that breaks one of those fails the build rather than shipping
English captions (translate): speak any supported language and get English captions, entirely on the phone. It is a labelled switch, never applied silently - and unlike every mainstream alternative, your audio is not uploaded to anyone to do it
18 of the 27 spoken languages are now verified end to end, each measured on native-voice audio through the real decode path rather than assumed from the model card
Bengali and Telugu transcription is not claimed any more, because we measured it and it does not work on-device - every phone-capable model loops rather than transcribing. The app now says so when you pick one, and points you at English captions instead. Speaking বাংলা and captioning in English does work, and was measured on the same take
A take that switches language mid-sentence captions each stretch in its own language
A guard that stops the transcriber quietly translating when you did not ask it to
The spoken language you chose is remembered across projects
The captions model download resumes by itself, and a Generate you queued while waiting fires as soon as it lands
Background removal preview stopped tearing moving limbs. A stale matte was being held for up to two frames; it is now motion-gated, and the recipe is locked behind a test so it cannot drift back. Exports were never affected

vMac 0.6 2026-07-27

Intro and outro cards, a timeline that does what you tell it, and text you can actually see

Intro & outro cards: add a full-screen coloured card with your text before or after your footage. Zella inserts the card AND the extra seconds of timeline to hold it, so an outro genuinely lands after your last frame instead of sitting on top of it
Timeline, rebuilt around what you see: a clip join is now a real boundary. Deleting the second of three clips took the third one with it, deleting anything at all was refused with "Can't delete the last remaining segment" on any multi-clip project, and dragging a clip to a new position moved the wrong one. All three were the same underlying cause
You can now delete every clip and clear a timeline you built - and undo it
Drag-to-reorder works whether or not you have cut anything. It previously did nothing until you made your first cut
The playhead no longer jumps to the next clip when you place it in a gap, and the timeline scrolls with it when you drag toward the LEFT edge, not just the right
Zoom bottoms out at fit. Zooming out past it used to keep counting without changing anything on screen, so the next few zoom-ins appeared to do nothing
Text Card backgrounds work. A colour picked for a card was saved fully transparent, so the card you set to green stayed empty - and existing projects are repaired on open, not just new ones
White text on a dark Text Card stays white. It was being flipped to near-black by a rule that assumed every card was the light default
Stroke colour had the same fault and is fixed the same way: an outline you set is now an outline you can see
UGC Cut saves its cut-out beside your recording, so reopening a project is instant. Every open used to re-do the identical work, which paused the preview each time and left hundreds of stray files behind
Library, Settings and the full Zella menu are now in the recording panel itself - the menu bar is not reachable at all until a window opens, so a first-run user had no way in
The recording panel and the recording toolbar respond to the FIRST click. Both are floating panels, and macOS was spending that click activating the window instead of pressing the button - including the Stop button while recording
A one-time hint under the Z icon on first run, teaching the right-click menu that has no affordance of its own

vMac 0.5 & iOS 0.4 2026-07-26

Cleaner voice, text that reads, and a sidebar you can find things in

Remove Noise + Polish Voice: the anti-hiss stages (noise gate, 15.5 kHz low-pass, makeup ceiling) now run on every Mac. They were previously limited to Apple Silicon on macOS 26, so Intel Macs amplified the leftover microphone hiss instead of removing it
Every Mac now uses the same studio voice tuning - gentler de-essing and compression, measured flat across the top octave instead of tilted into it
Text and title backgrounds: pick a background colour on any title style and it draws a rounded plate that hugs the text. It previously did nothing at all on 12 of the 23 styles, and drew a full-width band on the rest
New text alignment control for titles - left, centre, right or justified
Multi-clip selection on the timeline: Cmd+A, Cmd/Shift-click, or drag a marquee. Delete removes the whole selection as a single undo step
Jump to the start or end of the timeline with Home/End (Fn+Left / Fn+Right), and the timeline now scrolls along with the playhead when you drag it past the edge
Edits made while the preview is paused now show up immediately, instead of waiting until you scrubbed
Sidebar tools reordered by how often they are used: captions and the voice tools sit at the top, staging effects at the bottom
iPhone: title styling now survives a save - Text Cards, CTA badges, font weight, shadow, card artwork and glow colour were being dropped when a project was reopened
iPhone: editing a title moves the playhead onto it, so the change is visible straight away

viOS 0.3 & Mac 0.4 2026-07-25

Pro Week, a real audio mixer, and background removal that holds when you move

Pro Week - every new install gets the full Pro feature set for its first seven days, on iPhone and Mac. No card, no sign-up, nothing to cancel: on day eight the app becomes the permanent free tier, with no countdown banners and no new nagging. It is a one-time welcome, not a subscription trial
Background removal, rebuilt for movement: the matte is now the AGREEMENT of two on-device vision models (person segmentation and person-instance detection), computed fresh every frame, so a wall chunk one model hallucinates on a motion frame is vetoed by the other. Wave your hand and the backdrop stays put
A motion-adaptive edge: where the frame is actually moving, the cutout edge tightens automatically - motion blur bakes the old background colour into the contour itself, so those pixels are cut rather than kept. Still shots keep every hair
Edge decontamination on export: the thin silhouette shell is recoloured from the subject, so hair stops carrying a rim of the room you removed
Bokeh is the new default backdrop after background removal - a finished studio look out of the box, switchable to cutout, transparent, blur or any of the 40 backdrops afterwards
A dedicated Audio tool in the timeline toolbar: clip volume (0-200%) and mute, every video overlay's volume and mute, and the whole sound library - effects, voice changers, music and Auto-Duck - promoted out of Studio into the place you look for sound
Free-form overlay resize - picture-in-picture layers now stretch to any width and height independently, with one tap to snap back to the original ratio
Exports sound right: audio is now sliced as uncompressed PCM instead of AAC, so cuts land on the exact sample instead of the nearest compressed packet. That removes the small drift that could creep in across a heavily-cut edit
Exports are faster: the frame each vision model sees is now prepared once instead of twice, and the dark-room second pass only runs in genuinely dark scenes
Callout filters actually apply - Hue, Glitch and friends now render on callouts in preview and export, and Number-style callouts finally let you type the number
Auto Punch-ins is gone from Auto-Polish: zooming on every detected beat fired about once a second and read as unnatural. Beat Sync stays, as a deliberate per-band tool you tune yourself
Auto-Polish no longer forces a colour preset on your footage, and Bright & Sunny was retuned so it stops yellow-casting warm rooms

vMac 0.3 & iOS 0.2 2026-07-20

The pricing law, in code - and the Pro build-out

One law on both platforms: Free is the complete editor and ALL the intelligence - Auto-Polish, Make it Viral, the AI Assistant, Auto B-Roll, background removal, all 25 transitions and 25 colour looks - watermark-free, with unlimited recording. The only limits are on export: up to 2 minutes, at up to 1080p. 1080p is free forever
The AI Assistant is now free on the Mac too - it was behind the Advanced Tools toggle, which sold intelligence as a paid tier. It runs on your own API key, and only its export tool still honours the 4K and length ceilings
The full 25-transition catalog is free on the Mac, category filter included - the old gate hid the filter, not the transitions
Transparent-background export (Pro) - ProRes 4444 with alpha on Mac, HEVC with alpha on iPhone, so a background-removed clip drops straight onto any layer in another editor. Writes a .mov: an .mp4 cannot carry an alpha channel
60 fps export and custom bitrate (Pro)
Multi-aspect export queue (Pro) - 9:16, 1:1 and 16:9 rendered from one edit in one action
My Templates (Pro) - save your caption style, grade, transition and sound settings as a reusable look. Applying every built-in template stays free
The depth toolset is now a Pro delta on iPhone too - keyframe curves, feathered masks, speed ramps, Color Match and luma scopes. It gates the CONTROLS only: a project that already uses them still previews and exports on every tier
The three Founder cinematic grades - Teal & Orange, Kodak 2383 and Film Noir - now ship on iPhone as well as the Mac
Founder now leads with its real promise: every future major version, free - forever
Both apps ship a machine-checked pricing contract, so the tiers can never silently drift from what this page says

vMac 0.2 2026-07-20

Make it Viral, and Auto-Polish that runs itself

Make it Viral - a new one-tap flagship: the whole ready-to-post pass (clean voice, warm grade, word-pop captions, punch-in zooms, tightened pacing, transitions, matched sound effects and a ducked music bed), tuned for restraint and keeping your original aspect
Auto-Polish now runs automatically the moment a recording opens - captions, zoom-ins, a clean voice and colour, zero clicks (toggle off in settings)
Viral Templates gallery: Reel Pack, Hook Captions, Beat Drop, Cinematic Reel, Photo Cards and Reaction Split
Cleaner voice - rebuilt the studio voice chain: no more pumping or clipped words, with a gentle expander, a dry-blend neural denoise and an anti-hiss low-pass
On-device captions now generate automatically on load
Immersive fullscreen preview for camera-only recordings
Export: Share / Post is now the primary action, plus one-tap Save to Photos
Simpler, honest pricing - Free is watermark-free with every AI tool and 1080p export up to 2 minutes; Pro ($89) adds unlimited length + 4K/8K + the pro-depth tools; Founder ($299) adds three exclusive cinematic colour grades and supporter perks
28 colour grades (3 Founder-exclusive)

viOS 0.1 2026-07-10

Zella for iPhone - the studio, in your pocket

Native iPhone + iPad app (iOS 18+), rebuilt in Swift - editing runs entirely on-device, no cloud and no account
Capture: camera recording (front or back, with mic) with a live background - blur, cut out or replace while you film, baked straight into the recording - plus ReplayKit screen recording, whole-device broadcast, and import from Photos or Files
Segmented, crash-safe recording - a call or a flat battery never costs you the take
Editor: multi-clip timeline, cuts, ripple delete, drag-reorder, motion keyframes, zoom blocks and speed ramps with a curve editor
On-device AI: Clean Up (silences + filler words in one pass), Make Vertical (face-aware 9:16), Reel Pack one-tap reel, and transcript editing that ripple-cuts the video as you delete words
Polish Voice - automatic on-device noise removal, de-ess, compression and loudness normalization, with music Auto-Duck under your voice
25 transitions, 25 color looks + .cube LUT import, 9 caption presets with SRT import and on-device translation into 19 languages, 8 title templates with 12 kinetic entrances, 19 callout types
Feathered effect masks, a color board and a live luma scope
Export MP4 / MOV / GIF / M4A with platform presets, and hand a project to the Mac app as a .zella file
Universal Purchase - one Zella Pro unlocks Mac and iPhone. Free exports are watermark-free at up to 1080p and 2 minutes; Pro lifts the length cap and adds 4K

vMac 0.1 2026-07-04

Zella 1.0 - Record, Auto-Polish, Ship

Screen + camera capture: full screen, region, window, camera-only, webcam bubble
Auto-Polish: one click removes silences and filler words, adds captions, zooms in and enhances color
AI background removal - 40 built-in scenes (20 still, 20 animated), subject staging with backlight and a contact shadow
Webcam bubble: one-click UGC cutout to float over your screen with the background removed, plus a scene switch between camera full-screen and bubble
Auto B-Roll: fetch matching stock clips and drop them in by caption keyword - keyword matching runs on-device, bring your own free Pexels or Pixabay key
Full editor, free: B-key cut, ripple delete, drag-to-reorder, 50-level undo, per-clip volume, autosave with crash recovery
25 transitions, 25 color presets, 19 callout types, 9 caption presets with bundled viral fonts (Montserrat, Poppins, Anton, Bebas Neue) plus your own imports, 20 animated title styles
Sounds: procedural SFX library + 16 on-device voice changers, Polish Voice with five studio tones (Natural / Warm / Bright / Podcast / Cinematic) and Auto-Duck
Background removal locked to the main subject - other people and clutter are instance-gated out of the cutout, and the hairline edge halo is gone
One-click 9:16 / 1:1 / 16:9 reframe with face-aware auto-track; export MP4 / MOV / GIF / M4A at 1080p free
Advanced Tools switch (Pro): motion keyframes with a bezier curve editor, Color Match, live luma scopes, effect masks, speed ramps, per-drum Beat Sync, AI Assistant
4K and 8K export (Pro); free, Pro and Founder tiers, coming to the Mac App Store - no subscription
On-device only: no account, no cloud upload, ever