Zornov

Zornov™ is a free, open-source film studio. Edit, grade, animate puppets, build 3D worlds, compose the score and deliver, all in one app. An AI director can work on the same timeline while you do, and you can take over anywhere.

Every tool the window has is also one call away for AI assistants. Claude, Codex or any client that speaks MCP can open a project, cut it, light it, score it, look at the frames, check its own work and export, with the same tools you use.

Made in Zornov

Every film here was edited, animated, scored and exported in Zornov, from public-domain footage or from scratch.

Models made in Zornov

Every one modelled, dressed or grown in Zornov, many by an AI assistant driving its tools through MCP.

The editor

The AI editor

Tell it what you want, and it works on your timeline live, with more than 80 tools: it can see, listen, cut, model, animate, light, score, check and export.

• Crew mode splits a film across an Editor, Animator, Sound designer, VFX artist and Colourist working in parallel.
• Plans you can follow. Bigger jobs start with a plan. You approve checkpoints, correct it mid-flight, or stop it.
• Your edits and its edits never collide, and each side has its own undo.
• Skills and lessons. It loads how-to packs for each kind of work and learns from your corrections. You can edit or delete what it learned in Settings.
• Checks before export: overlaps, titles over faces, flat lighting, floating objects, sliding feet, bad lip sync and more, each with the exact fix.
• Real media first. It looks in your library before it generates anything.
• Careful with outside content. Web pages, transcripts and shared notes are treated as material, never as instructions, and anything that sends data out or spends money asks you first.

The AI editor uses the model you connect: Codex with your ChatGPT sign-in, Claude Code, or an API key. What you ask it, and what it looks at to answer, goes to that provider. The rest of Zornov works without it, and offline.

With your AI assistant

zornov mcp serves every tool to an AI assistant over the Model Context Protocol. If the project is open in a Zornov window, you watch each edit land as the assistant makes it.

Assistant	Set it up
Claude Code	/plugin marketplace add zornov/zornov, then /plugin install zornov@zornov
Claude Desktop	Open Zornov.mcpb from the latest release
Codex	codex mcp add zornov -- zornov mcp --project /path/to/my-video
Any MCP client	{"command": "zornov", "args": ["mcp", "--project", "/path/to/my-video"]}

The assistant gets the whole studio, not a render API: edit takes ops in one undoable step, see and contact_sheet show it the frames, listen lets it hear the mix, and check, review and qc tell it what a professional wouldn't ship before it exports. Leave out --project and it opens or starts a project itself. On Windows, use zornov-cli.exe. See AI assistants (MCP) for every setup.

What it does

Edit

• A magnetic timeline with lanes, markers, groups, nesting, ripple, roll, slip and slide.
• Source/record editing, J and L cuts, three-point edits, takes and string-outs.
• Keyframes and curves, speed ramps, time remapping, freeze frames and reverse.
• Titles, lower thirds, callouts, charts and 3D text, edited in place on the canvas.

Picture

• Its own codecs, written in Rust. It reads H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, ProRes, AAC, Opus, Vorbis, FLAC and MP3 from MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV, and writes H.264, ProRes, DNxHR and AAC. HEVC 10-bit goes through the Mac's hardware encoder.
• Masters as EXR and DPX sequences, and MXF track files for DCP and IMF packages.
• A GPU compositor working in 16-bit float, with blend modes, masks, mattes, tracking, stabilising and corner pinning.
• Colour grading with scopes, LUTs, HDR and shot matching.
• Keying, rotoscoping and cut-outs. Restore, denoise, upscale and smooth slow motion.

3D

• A full modelling workspace: extrude, inset, bevel, loop cut, knife and bridge, modifiers, UVs, materials and sculpting.
• Characters with fingers, eyes, lashes and teeth, sculpted hairstyles that sit under a hat, and closed clothes that move with the skin, with fabric patterns at their real size. Rigs, and walks with planted feet.
• Shapes from mathematics: lattices like the gyroid, fractals like the Mandelbulb and Menger sponge, parametric surfaces, knots, height fields, L-system plants, phyllotaxis and strange attractors, or any formula of x, y, z and time. Twist, bend, taper and warp any model. Fractals and implicit solids can be traced straight from their formula on the GPU, with no mesh.
• Toon and anime looks: cel bands, shadow colour, rim light and ink outlines on any model, and anime proportions for characters.
• Physics: rigid bodies, ragdolls, cloth, hair, fracture, fluids and smoke, baked to the timeline.
• A real-time renderer and a path tracer with weather, fog, light beams and wet surfaces.
• Walkable worlds with terrain, plants, water and sky, recorded as camera shots. Procedural streets and interiors in eight styles.
• glTF, OBJ, FBX, STL, PLY and USD import (USD as text: .usda, or a .usdz holding a text layer; binary .usdc is not read). Export to glTF, USD (.usdz and .usda), FBX, OBJ, STL and PLY.

Animation

• Puppets with pins, bones and scissor cuts, so limbs and lips move apart. They walk, run and sneak, each foot planted on the ground and lifted in an arc.
• Lip sync, blinks, acting beats, drivers and squash and stretch.
• Motion presets, stagger, expressions and particles.
• Vector illustration with paths, pathfinder, type and trace.

Sound

• A mixer with buses, loudness, stems, dialogue cleanup and ADR, and an effects chain on every clip.
• Original music composed in the app in 18 genres, from jazz and folk to metal, trap, drum and bass, synthwave and chiptune, fitted to the exact length and cue points. It plays 29 instruments, distorted guitars with power chords among them, and says so when the brief asks for something it can't make.
• More than 50 physically modelled sound effects, 16 animal voices, footsteps on 14 surfaces, and sung vocals.
• Narration with the system's voices, or ElevenLabs and Fish Audio if you add their keys.

Download

Get Zornov for macOS, Windows or Linux from zornov.com/download. It updates itself from inside the app.

Build and run

Zornov is written in Rust (edition 2024). Each system builds natively, and each one packages and starts a little differently.

macOS and Linux

cargo build --release -p studio-app
./target/release/zornov

One zornov program does both: started from Finder, the Dock or a desktop entry it opens the editor, and in a terminal it gives the prompt.

Package	Command	Makes
macOS app	cargo xtask bundle	dist/Zornov.app
macOS DMG, signed and notarised	cargo xtask release-mac	see docs/releasing.md
Linux portable	cargo xtask package-linux	dist/zornov-linux-<arch>.tar.gz
Linux packages	cargo xtask package-deb, package-appimage	dist/release/

Windows

From Command Prompt:

git clone https://github.com/zornov/zornov.git
cd zornov
cargo build --release -p studio-app
target\release\zornov.exe

You need Rust with the MSVC toolchain and the Windows SDK. The build copies DXC, Microsoft's DirectX shader compiler, from the SDK next to zornov.exe, and Zornov draws through DirectX 12 with it, because Vulkan crashes on some Intel graphics drivers.

Windows ships two programs side by side: zornov.exe opens the editor (double click, Start menu), and zornov-cli.exe is for the terminal, so use zornov-cli wherever these docs say zornov in a terminal.

Package	Command	Makes
Portable zip	cargo xtask package-windows	dist\zornov-windows-x64.zip
Installer	cargo xtask package-msi (needs WiX 5)	dist\release\Zornov-<version>-windows-x64.msi

The last crate (the app itself) takes a long time to optimise, so the build can sit at 628/629 for a while. The build needs files with LF line endings, as committed; .gitattributes makes Git for Windows keep them. See Windows for what you need, fixing an older CRLF checkout, the two programs, graphics, and signing.

See docs/releasing.md for signing, notarisation and the update feed on every system.

To build and test the Linux version without installing anything else, use the container in docker/Dockerfile. Open the repository in VS Code or GitHub Codespaces and choose Reopen in Container, or run:

docker build -t zornov-linux docker
docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/work" zornov-linux cargo test --workspace

The container has a software graphics driver, so the GPU tests run without a graphics card. It can also check that the Windows code compiles; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

From the terminal

Everything the window does also works from a terminal, or with no window at all, for scripts, render machines and AI assistants. Every film above was made this way.

zornov new my-video && cd my-video
zornov card colour=red at=0 duration=2
zornov text "Hello" at=0.5
zornov check
zornov export out.mp4

Run zornov on its own for a prompt: commands run, anything else goes to the AI editor. zornov agent --headless speaks JSON for scripts, and zornov mcp serves the tools to any AI assistant that speaks MCP. On Windows, type zornov-cli instead of zornov. See Terminal and headless use.

Documentation

Guide	What it covers
AI crew	How the AI editor and its crew work
Terminal and headless use	The zornov prompt, one-off commands, JSON for scripts, MCP for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and others, and render nodes
Seeing what agents go through	For Zornov's developers: the flight recorder, friction reports, replay, and the dev-only live tap
Plugins	Writing plugins: effects, generators, transitions, importers, exporters and panels
Accessibility	Using Zornov without a mouse, with a screen reader, at large sizes and in any light
Localisation	The interface languages and how to add translations
Onboarding, help and workspaces	First run, built-in help and layouts
Accounts and cloud	Optional accounts, credits, the cloud and the marketplace (off by default)
Models	The AI models Zornov can download when you ask, and their licences
Automation security

The app is in app/: the interface, the editor, the 3D workspace and the AI editor. Its engines are libraries in crates/, grouped by what they do:

Folder	What it holds
crates/codecs/	Video and audio codecs: H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, ProRes, DNxHR, AAC, Opus (Vorbis, FLAC and MP3 are read in crates/media/)
crates/media/	Containers, decoding, encoding, delivery, capture and web media
crates/picture/	The GPU renderer, colour, effects, text, motion graphics, Lottie
crates/paint/	The paint and photo engine (layers, brushes, PSD, RAW, HEIF)
crates/vector/	Vector illustration, path operations, tracing
crates/3d/	Meshes, modelling, rigs, physics, worlds, 3D quality checks
crates/sound/	Audio engine, mixing, synthesis, speech and lip sync
crates/ai/	AI models and the inference engine
crates/project/	The project model, content library, production, languages, updates
crates/plugins/	The plugin host and its API
crates/business/	Accounts, plans and the cloud server (off by default)
crates/dev/	Build tasks (cargo xtask), the shared test kit, the text checks, and the agent tools a dev build can hot-swap

Outside crates/:

Folder	What it holds
docs/	The guides above, and the README's pictures and films
docker/	The Linux build container (also the dev container)
plugins/	Example plugins (examples/) and their built .wasm files (dist/), bundled with the app
packaging/	Release configuration, the app icons, macOS entitlements, the Linux desktop entry, the Claude Code plugin and the Claude Desktop extension manifest
.claude-plugin/	The Claude Code plugin marketplace that /plugin marketplace add zornov/zornov reads
testdata/	Small shared media, audio and image files used by the codec and app tests
tools/	Stand-alone developer tools (pack-content)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md. GOVERNANCE.md explains how decisions are made, and SECURITY.md how to report a security problem privately.

Licence

Zornov is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (LICENSE). You can use, study, change and share it. If you distribute it, or offer a changed version to people over a network, you share your source under the same licence.

For products or services that can't follow the AGPL, Zornov is also available under a commercial licence from Ashrox LLC; see LICENSING.md.

Copyright 2026 Ashrox LLC and contributors. Zornov™ and the Zornov logo are trademarks of Ashrox LLC; see Trademarks. Third-party credits are in ATTRIBUTIONS.md, and model licences are in docs/models.md. The films above use public-domain footage from NASA, the Library of Congress (Carol M. Highsmith) and Wikimedia Commons contributors.