filmcraft/ROADMAP.md

FilmCraft Roadmap

Progress toward feature parity with Adobe Premiere Pro, with estimates. Updated as milestones land.

Last updated: 2026-10-01 · Overall parity: ~45% · Code: ~125k lines of Rust in 31 crates, 800+ tests

Estimate to parity

Throughput observed so far: ~25% parity in the first ~5 wall-clock hours (Sep 30, 05:22 → 10:00), with 3–4 coding agents running in parallel and one integrator. The early percentage points were the cheap ones; the remaining work is broader, with a long tail of commands, dialogs and edge cases.

	Agent-hours	Wall-clock (4–6 parallel agents, 24/7)
Feature parity by checklist	~350–500	~100–150 h (4–6 days)
Robust on real-world material (codec edge cases, 4K/8K performance, pro workflows)	+150–300	+1–2 weeks

Limits on speed: machine load (builds and benchmarks slow down under many agents), disk space, and a single integrator merging and checking each agent's work. With one agent and no parallelism, multiply wall-clock by ~3–4.

Not reachable clean-room and locally: Generative Extend (needs a large video-generation model). Enhance Speech and Auto Reframe are feasible only with openly licensed models we can ship.

Milestones

Status: ✅ done · 🟡 in progress · ⬜ not started. Estimates are remaining agent-hours.

#	Milestone	Status	Done	Remaining	Est.
M0	Skeleton + visual shell	✅	Workspace, 20 crates, dock/workspaces, Premiere 26 look, native menus, control channel, MCP, xtask gates (layers, wasm)	—	—
M1	Media I/O	✅	MP4/MOV demux+mux, WAV, stills, MJPEG, symphonia audio (MP3/FLAC/ALAC/Vorbis), GOP seek + frame cache, import	Media Browser polish	2
M2	H.264 decoder	✅	Own decoder, bit-exact on 37+ streams, 500–600 fps 1080p	—	—
M3	Editing core	🟡	Edit algebra (insert/overwrite/razor/lift/extract/ripple/roll/slip/slide/rate-stretch/nest/paste), tools, markers, trim mode + Trim Monitor + dynamic J/K/L trimming, Keyboard Shortcuts editor with FilmCraft/Premiere/FCP/Avid presets	Multicam, subclip polish, ~220 Premiere default shortcuts whose commands don't exist yet	6–10
M4	Playback	🟡	Audio-clock master, prefetch, J/K/L, dropped-frame stats, playback resolution	Render previews, render bar, 4K/8K tuning	8–12
M5	Effects, keyframes, GPU	🟡	~60 CPU effects, 30 transitions, keyframes + value/velocity graphs, wgpu compositor	Full ~150-effect catalogue, WGSL parity for all, masks + tracking, adjustment layers, presets, Warp Stabilizer, Morph Cut	30–45
M6	Export	✅	Own H.264 encoder (High/Main/Baseline, B-frames, VBR/CBR/2-pass) → MP4 + own AAC; ProRes, MJPEG, PNG, GIF, WAV; background jobs	Preset library, queue UI, smart render	6–8
M7	Audio	🟡	Mixer graph (tracks → submixes → Mix, pre/post-fader inserts and sends, latency-compensated, sample-accurate, ~6× realtime for 24 tracks × 3 effects on one core), Audio Track Mixer + Audio Clip Mixer panels, track automation (Off/Read/Latch/Touch/Write, recorded live while playing, thinned to keyframes, timeline lanes with pen editing), solo/solo-safe, channel mapping basics, peak + BS.1770 loudness meters (match ffmpeg), DSP crate with 16 clip/track effects, Audio Gain (set/adjust/normalize), Constant Power / Constant Gain / Exponential Fade, Essential Sound (types, Loudness auto-match, Repair incl. DeEss/DeReverb, Clarity, Creative, Ducking keyframes, presets; full Dialogue chain 22× realtime)	Music duration remix, ML speech enhancement, 5.1 panner and multichannel buses, voice-over record, effect editor windows (EQ curve), remaining effects (multiband, convolution reverb), clip-mixer automation recording	6–9
M8	Colour	🟡	Lumetri: basic, creative + looks, RGB & hue curves, wheels, HSL secondary, vignette; basic scopes	LUT import UI, colour match, colour management + HDR (PQ/HLG, log, tone mapping)	8–12
M9	More codecs	🟡	ProRes decode+encode, AAC decode+encode, HEVC Main/Main 10 decoder (bit-exact on 41 fixtures, ~225 fps 1080p), VP9 decoder (profiles 0–3, 8/10/12-bit, bit-exact on 50+ fixtures; WebM/MKV V_VP9 and MP4 vp09 import with key-frame-checked seeking), Matroska/WebM import (H.264/HEVC/VP9/ProRes/MJPEG + AAC/Opus/FLAC/MP3/Vorbis/PCM), Opus decoder (SILK/CELT/hybrid, 5.1/7.1 multistream; all RFC 8251 vectors range-exact; WebM/MKV/MP4)	VP9 frame threading, Ogg Opus files, AV1 (rav1d), DNxHR, MXF, hardware decode	12–20
M10	Graphics & captions	🟡	Caption tracks (Subtitle/CEA-608/708/Teletext formats, track style), SRT/WebVTT/SCC import+export (frame-exact, property-tested), caption editing (add/split/merge/trim/move, sync-locked insert/extract), Text panel Captions tab, burn-in in Program monitor and export; text engine (crates/text: bundled + system fonts, harfrust shaping, bidi, line breaking, paragraph layout, glyph cache; 3-line 1080p title ≈ 0.15 ms warm); graphic clips with text + shape layers (fill, 2 strokes, background, shadow, keyframable transform), Type tool with on-monitor editing, shape/pen tools, Properties/Essential Graphics editor, align/distribute	Responsive design pins, rolls/crawls, per-character styles, motion graphics templates, MCC/STL/TTML, 608/708 embedding, speech-to-text	12–18
M11	Interchange & project management	🟡	.fcproj schema versions + migrations, atomic saves, Save a Copy/Revert, auto-save ring + crash-recovery journal (Preferences ▸ Auto Save, recovery prompt), FCP7 XML, FCPXML, EDL, OTIO	Relink/offline, project manager, proxies	8
M12–M16	Web (WASM), platform, long tail	🟡	L0–L4 crates compile to wasm32	Web app shell (file access, WebCodecs, audio), ~850 remaining commands and dialogs, performance hardening	40–65

Running now

• Playback: fix a UI hang after preview renders, then a load-robust playback benchmark and profiling (target: 3 × 1080p streams with 0 dropped frames)

Log

• 2026-10-01 (M7.4): Essential Sound panel: Dialogue/Music/SFX/Ambience types, Loudness auto-match (BS.1770, exact to the target), Repair (noise, rumble, hum, new DeEsser and spectral DeReverb), Clarity (dynamics, EQ presets, Enhance Speech DSP chain), Creative reverb / stereo width, ducking that writes Volume keyframes, presets; all essentialSound.* commands, effects visible and keyframable in Effect Controls.

• 2026-10-01 (later): text engine (shaping, bidi, line breaking) + Type/Shape/Pen tools + graphic clips + graphics panel; Trim Monitor + dynamic trimming; Keyboard Shortcuts editor; audio mixer with automation. Fixed: MP4 muxer wrote unreadable all-empty sample tables; system font scan race.

• 2026-10-01: Audio mixing (M7.2/M7.5/M7.6 basics): mixer graph with submixes, sends, inserts and latency compensation; Audio Track / Clip Mixer panels; Latch/Touch/Write automation recorded live; timeline track keyframes; Audio Gain dialog.

• 2026-10-01: recovered from a machine crash with no lost work. Merged: VP9 decoder (profiles 0–3, bit-exact, WebM/MKV/MP4), Opus decoder (RFC 8251 range-exact; WebM/MKV/MP4), captions (SRT/VTT/SCC, burn-in), render bar + render previews, project schema versioning + atomic saves + auto-save + crash-recovery journal, test infrastructure (golden images, loudness oracle vs ffmpeg, headless scripted UI tests; fixed a GPU stale-texture bug), public contributor docs and licence files.

• 2026-09-30 (evening): Opus decoder (RFC 6716/8251, range-exact on every conformance vector, ~80–110× realtime 48 kHz stereo) wired into WebM/MKV and MP4 import.

• 2026-09-30 (afternoon): Matroska/WebM import; LUFS meters; clip audio effects on the DSP crate.

• 2026-09-30 (midday): HEVC decoder, Matroska/WebM demuxer and audio DSP merged; HEVC import wired; asset rules (AGENTS.md, ATTRIBUTION.md, cargo xtask assets); README with hero screenshot and the Craft family.

• 2026-09-30 (late morning): keyframe value/velocity graphs; xtask gates; H.264 MP4 export; Lumetri curves, wheels, looks, HSL secondary.

• 2026-09-30 (early morning): H.264 decoder, ProRes, AAC; GPU compositor; MCP; Premiere 26 visual fidelity pass.