ShotboxIn the next release
Added
- UI cards in the library. The twelve UI cards have their own tab in the editor's left sidebar, Cards, as pictures of each card finished. Hover one and it plays, larger, beside the sidebar, with a line on what it does; click it to add it at the playhead. They are no longer listed in the Insert menu or the inspector, which now point to the tab.
- Twelve more UI cards, and the Cards tab in four groups. The tab is now Interface, Social, Numbers and Graphics, 24 cards in all. New: - Interface — Progress bar (a label and a percentage counting up as the bar fills, ending on a tick and done words such as "Uploaded"); Settings toggles (a heading and up to four iOS-style switches, light or dark, each flipping on at its own step;
+starts a row on); Pricing plans (two or three plans typed asLabel: pricewith up to three ticked features each; at Pick one lifts with an accent outline, a "Most popular" pill and a filled button, and Price after can roll its price down, £19 → £12; on a 9:16 project the picked plan is drawn large and the others narrow). - Social — Notifications (an app name and up to eight messages stacking in near the top of the frame, with Stagger); Chat thread (up to six messages,>for yours; theirs after typing dots, yours popping in, an optional "Read"; light or dark); Review (avatar, name, handle, a quote and one to five stars popping in); Follow button (a profile chip whose Follow turns to "Following" with a tick while the follower count rolls up). - Numbers — Countdown (a big number counting down from 3–10 over a draining accent ring, ending on "Go!" or your own word); Poll (a question and two to four options asLabel: number; one ticks at Vote, then every bar fills as its figure counts up); Bar chart (two to six bars asLabel: figurerising one after another with a small overshoot, the accent bar's figure counting up in a pill; light or dark). - Graphics — Spinner to tick (an accent arc spinning until Done, then a ring, a tick drawing on and a small burst); Hand-drawn mark (a circle, underline or arrow drawn on from a round pen tip, in the accent or any colour, with a wobble that is the same on every export). Point at picks a layer, or a part of a UI card such as its button, and fits a circle round it, an underline under it or an arrow at it from the side with room; on 9:16 a fitted circle stays in the frame. The cursor can click Follow, a plan, a switch and a poll option. - Blur in and out for pictures, videos and cards. Pictures, videos, UI cards, web cards and image walls have Blur in and Blur out under Fade: over the fade the layer goes from out of focus, see-through and slightly small to sharp and full size, and back on the way out. Only the layer softens, and it works on 3D-tilted layers.
- Comments card (Insert ▸ UI Card ▸ Comments). A pile of white comment cards with round avatars, alternating left and right and slightly tipped, some with a reply peeking out behind. At Pile in each one blurs and grows into place, faster as the pile grows. Type one comment per line, up to 12; Stagger sets the pace.
- Tag a picture, video or card. Turn on Tag for a white pill with a logo and a bold name on one of the layer's corners, half over its edge. Tag words, Tag logo (Choose…, Brand logo or None) and Tag corner; it moves, turns, fades and blurs with its layer.
- Tags that fly in. Tag flies in pops the tag in alone (top right by default) a moment before its layer, then flies it to its corner as the layer fades or blurs in, where it docks and follows any drift or 3D tilt.
- Steps list looks. Style (Light or Dark), Title in capitals, Descriptions (a grey second line under each step), Numbers (Square or Circle) and Entrance (Row by row, or All at once: the whole card pops in).
- Safe zones on 9:16. A phone button beside the player controls shades where TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts cover the picture — tabs, button column, caption and handle — and outlines the clear area. Editor only, never exported; the sizes are approximate, as of October 2026.
- Highlight a word in a title. Select words in a title and click Highlight word, or type
word: a rounded marker, lime or your brand kit's accent, sweeps on behind them with the entrance, or as the word is said under Spoken words. Title style sets the Highlight and Word colours. - Explainer layout (Library › Arrangements › Split screen). A plain light stage beside or above you, framed on your face; Explainer reel 9:16 also sets a 1080 × 1920 canvas. Stage share and Stage colour in the inspector. Titles land at the top of the stage and cards below it. New title design Explainer headline: dark type with a lime-highlighted key word.
- UI cards (Insert ▸ UI Card). Eleven interface cards that change step by step: Form, Badge, Steps List, FAQ, Time Picker, Video, Browser Window, Flow Diagram, Timer Dial, Typing Bubble and Question Marks. Words, fields and timings are set in the inspector's UI card section.
- A cursor that clicks the card. Show cursor sends an arrow in to click the part of a UI card each step changes, with a press and a ripple, then off again. Each step's Clicks picker chooses the target.
- UI cards on spoken words. Right-click words in the transcript › Show a UI Card Here, or, with a card selected, Card Step Here: the change lands on the word and stays on it through later cuts.
- Search bar titles. The Search bar design types each line into a search box, deletes it and types the next — one search per line.
- Words as they're said. The Spoken words design brings a title's words up one at a time, each as it is spoken, and keeps them in step when you cut.
- Beside the presenter. A layer that would cover you is drawn in the open space beside you instead, and follows you between wide shots and close-ups. On for anything put on spoken words.
- Rolling digits. Count up › Roll the digits turns a figure like a meter: #7 → #8, 6 → 12.
- Calendar page (Insert ▸ Calendar). A calendar-page card whose number turns — 6 MONTHS to 12.
- Tab. The Tab design, or On the bottom edge, stands a title's plate on the foot of the frame, rounded on top only.
- 3D tilt and camera moves. Any picture, title, card, lift-out or image wall can be leaned back and turned in perspective, taken out of focus as if far away, and pushed into or drifted across while it is on screen (Overlays › 3D tilt). An image wall tilted back with a slow drift is the board of cards from a launch video.
- Rotating words and counting figures. The Rotating words title rolls through a list of words with the ones either side blurred; the Counter title and Insert ▸ Statistic count a figure up, through earlier figures if you like, with a rotating label beneath.
- Show a title, image or app icon on spoken words. Select words in the transcript and right-click: the layer appears as they are said, and stays on them when the cut beneath changes.
- Image wall (Insert ▸ Image Wall…). A set of pictures that scroll past in columns, or fill in as a staggered grid.
- Launch video template (New Launch Video…, or Insert ▸ Launch Video Template). Hook, product moments, social proof and call to action as chapters, with branded placeholder titles on a lane and the teleprompter script split into the same sections.
- Put a layer behind yourself. Select a title, image or video and turn on Behind presenter (Overlays): it covers the room but not you, so a big word can sit behind your head. Works with any camera background, and is prepared the same way as Pop out and Cut out.
- Blur entrances and a Focus blur transition. Titles can now come in from out of focus to sharp, and leave the same way: choose Blur under Motion in or Motion out. Focus blur, the seventeenth transition, takes the picture out of focus, changes clip while it is soft and brings it back sharp. Titles and images on top stay sharp.
- Connector lines. Select two or more overlays and choose Insert › Connect. A curve draws itself out from one to the other, or from a logo to each of several pill labels in turn, and follows them wherever they move. It can be curved, straight or elbowed, solid, dashed or dotted, with an arrow or a dot at either end, in your brand colour.
- Duplicate several overlays at once. With a group or a shift-click selection, Duplicate copies all of it, along with the lines between the pieces.
- Lift out a piece of the recording (Insert ▸ Lift Out…). Drag a rectangle over the frame and that part of the recording floats as a playing card, with rounded corners and a shadow, over your brand's gradient while the rest goes out of focus. Clicks inside it show in the card.
- Blur what's behind this layer while it's on screen, for any layer, with a Blur amount and an optional Dim. Use it for a logo reveal.
- Punch in at cuts (Camera section). One camera looks like two: the camera alternates between the shot as framed and a close-up on the presenter's face at every cut, including the cuts left by deleting words in the transcript. Set any clip to Wide or Close-up by hand.
- Angled split screen. A new arrangement with a slanted edge between the product and the presenter, with an optional line along it in your brand colour. With Pop out or Cut out, the presenter steps across the edge.
- Selection box. A Figma-style box with handles and a size tag that draws itself around a photo or any picture overlay.
- A camera pane in a split screen now starts in step with its clip when you choose it. Panes chosen before keep their timing.
- Choose the export format and quality. The Studio editor's Export section now offers MP4 (H.264), HEVC (smaller files), ProRes (for handing on to an editor) and GIF, with a Quality setting: Low, Medium, High or Best, and a Resolution for video: 720p, 1080p, 1440p or 4K. The editor remembers your choices. High exports are sharper than before, and larger. Medium is close to the old size.
- Brand kit (menu bar › Brand Kit…). Set your logo, name, website, colours and font once. Your logo is stamped on exported screenshots and videos, your colours lead the backdrop swatches, and your look is offered as titles (lower third, opener, end card, badge) and as a caption style. Export the kit as one file so a whole team can import it.
- Drag captions anywhere in the video preview.
- Arrange the recording, the camera, captions and overlays like layers. Select one and use Arrange › Bring to Front, Bring Forward, Send Backward or Send to Back (⇧⌘F, ⌥⇧⌘F, ⌥⇧⌘B, ⇧⌘B), or the buttons in the inspector. An image can now go behind the recording, the camera in front of an overlay, and captions behind a title.
- Captions can be dragged almost to the top of the video. They used to stop 60% of the way up.
- Subscription (menu bar › Activate Shotbox…, or Settings › Subscription…). Paste the licence key from your receipt to activate. One key covers up to 3 Macs, and Deactivate This Mac frees a place. Shotbox checks about once a month and works offline in between. If a subscription lapses, everything you made still opens and exports.
Changed
- The video editor feels like a video editor. A pass over finding your way, adding things, the timeline and the inspector: - Finding your way — the toolbar under the player is three named groups, View, Edit and Timeline, and hovering a button names it and its shortcut; in a narrow window the least-used buttons move into a … menu instead of being cut off. ⌘K opens a command box that runs any menu command or toolbar button by name, adds any library item, and jumps to a chapter or a caption; forgiving matching, recent first. ? shows every shortcut. New Video Project opens an empty editor — drop a recording on it, choose one, or Record — instead of a file picker. - Adding things — drag titles, UI cards, pictures, recordings and sounds from the library onto a timeline lane at the moment you want (a ghost snaps into place; drop between lanes for a new lane), transitions onto the join between two clips, layouts and split screens onto a clip, and titles, cards and pictures onto the canvas where you let go. Clicking a tile still adds it at the playhead. Empty lanes say what to drag onto them, and a layer added while paused is shown arrived rather than at its invisible first frame. - The timeline — layer clips show a small picture of themselves, a symbol and a colour per kind, and layers that overlap stack on rows. Dragged and trimmed clips snap to the playhead, other clips, chapters, caption words and the ends of the video, with a yellow line and a trackpad tick (hold ⌘ for exact). Hover to preview any moment without moving the playhead (H turns it off); J / K / L shuttle at 1×, 2× and 4×, the arrow keys step a frame, a second or a cut, and a badge shows the speed. Zoomed in, a strip above the lanes shows the whole video. Reordered clips slide aside, ⌘+ / ⌘− and pinch glide (the zoom slider follows your hand), playback scrolls smoothly, and dragging the playhead plays the sound under it (the speaker button; ⌥-click for sound while hovering). - The inspector — the right panel has a Project tab for canvas, backdrop, branding, default layout, camera, zoom, cursor, angles, captions, timeline and export. The Inspector tab is headed by a picture of the selection with its name, kind, start and length, and shows only the sections that change it (Overlays is now Layer). A small bar above the selected layer on the canvas changes its fade, blur, size, colour and place, duplicates or deletes it, and shrinks to fit a small preview.
- Video exports are about four times faster — around three times real time on an M1 MacBook Air — and the Mac no longer sleeps partway through one.
- Camera Pop out and Cut out are prepared about four and a half times faster — a ten-minute camera recording in about a minute and a half.
- Choosing a font with several widths now uses its normal width, not a condensed one.
Removed
- Launch video template. New Launch Video…, Insert › Launch Video Template, its launcher card and the teleprompter's template button are gone while the idea is rethought. Script headings (
# Hook) still work in every teleprompter script.
Fixed
- Clicks on the timeline right after an undo are kept. A click made straight after ⌘Z or ⌘⇧Z (or while the editor was still opening) could jump the playhead back, showing the wrong frame until it moved again; and two quick undos could send the playhead to the start of the video.
- Transparent pictures no longer sit on a dark card. A logo or app icon with see-through corners was drawn over a black box, the shape its shadow was cast from. Its shadow now follows the picture's own outline.
- Projects from late August open again. Seventeen recordings edited between 29 and 31 August would not reopen in the editor, because they were saved before some newer settings existed. They now open with their edits intact and today's defaults for anything they predate.
- "No speech found" over a recording full of speech. When the Mac's speech recogniser refused to run, most often because Dictation was switched off, Shotbox reported an empty transcript. It now says what went wrong and points to System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation.
- Pop-out height did nothing when dragged. Neither did Padding, Inset, Corners, Shadow, Spacing, Opacity, Rounded corners or Text size in the screenshot editor. All of them now apply as you drag.
- The camera was missing from the very first frame of a video.