Instagram Brings Its Edits Video Editor to the Mac, With Hooks for AI Agents

The Mac app was announced on November 5 in a blog post by Brett Westervelt, who leads Edits, and is available to download from Instagram's website. Westervelt said it was designed "to support more involved projects" in situations "where a larger screen and the precision of a mouse and keyboard really matter." Videos can be exported in horizontal and vertical formats at up to 4K without a watermark, or published directly to Instagram with tagging, location and trial reels.

The launch puts Meta's app in more direct competition with ByteDance's CapCut, the editor Edits was built to challenge when it arrived last year. CapCut has offered desktop versions for Windows and Mac since 2021, TechCrunch noted. For creators, the practical change is that they no longer need to edit on a computer, move the file to a phone and then finish and post it from there.

MCP support is the least conventional part of the release. The protocol, an open standard introduced by Anthropic in 2024 and since adopted by other major AI developers, gives AI assistants a common way to call on external software. Instagram's post says creators can connect AI agents to the desktop editor so that the agents can help with their projects. It does not say which agents are supported, which editing functions they can reach, or whether the feature carries any usage limits.

The rest of the feature list is aimed at people who have outgrown phone editing. The desktop app has a full multi-track timeline, keyframes for transitions, audio waveforms for cutting to the beat, and tools for splitting, cutting and trimming clips. Colour grading includes colour wheels, curves and log conversion, and users can import their own LUTs, the colour lookup tables used by video editors, as well as custom font files. Keyboard shortcuts can be customised or carried over from other editing software.

The app also includes Instagram's licensed, royalty-free audio library, hundreds of sound and video effects and unlimited automatic captions in multiple languages. Audio and text styles saved in the mobile app appear on the desktop.

Edits has grown quickly since its launch. "In just over a year, 50 million people have made Edits part of how they bring ideas to life," Westervelt wrote. Instagram told TechCrunch it would keep developing the mobile app alongside the desktop version.

Some features are still missing. The ability to work on a single project across a phone and a Mac is in development, according to the company, and the announcement does not mention a Windows version. Instagram said it would update the desktop app every week, the same pace it keeps for the mobile app.