FilmCraft Wrote Its Own Video Codecs - Here's What It Can't Play

FilmCraft, the free AI-built Premiere Pro clone, doesn't use FFmpeg - it reads your videos with codecs it wrote itself.

That's unusual. Kdenlive, Shotcut and OpenShot all lean on FFmpeg, the open-source engine behind a huge share of the world's video apps, to open your files.

FilmCraft 0.8.0, out on 14 October, plays most everyday video just fine. But one common type of camera file still won't open - here's which, and the two-minute fix.

What FilmCraft Actually Built

FilmCraft is part of ArtCraft, the project behind the free AI-built Photoshop and Premiere alternatives that went viral this month. It was built largely with AI, the project says, and went from version 0.1 to 0.8 in twelve days.

Its GitHub page puts it bluntly: "No FFmpeg inside". Instead, the video readers (decoders) were written from scratch, from the public specifications:

• Video it reads with its own code: H.264, HEVC (H.265), AV1, VP8, VP9 and ProRes.
• Audio it reads with its own code: AAC and Opus. MP3, FLAC, ALAC and Vorbis still use an outside library for now.
• What it can export: H.264 MP4, ProRes and DNxHR. HEVC export needs hardware help, such as an NVIDIA graphics card on Windows, and there's no AV1 export yet.

FFmpeg is only used to check the work. The team compares FilmCraft's output frame by frame against FFmpeg's, and its HEVC decoder matches exactly on 41 standard test videos.

What It Can't Play Yet

Here's the catch. FilmCraft reads HEVC in its two everyday flavours, called Main and Main 10. Both store colour in a format called 4:2:0, which is what phones, drones and most cameras record by default.

Many mirrorless cameras offer a higher-quality 10-bit 4:2:2 mode for serious editing - and that isn't on FilmCraft's list. Creative Bloq hit exactly this: its 10-bit 4:2:2 footage from a Canon EOS R5 simply wouldn't play.

Also missing for now: camera RAW video, and Premiere project files (.prproj). The project also lists speed on big footage as a known gap, and says it has had less testing on Windows and Linux.

The Fix: Convert It First

This is the same workaround Creative Bloq used. Free HandBrake turns the clip into a standard H.264 file that FilmCraft opens without complaint:

1. Open the clip in HandBrake.
2. In Preset, pick Production > Production Standard for the best quality to edit with, or General > Fast 1080p30 for small, quick files.
3. Click Start Encode, then import the new MP4 into FilmCraft.

Production files are big, so keep an eye on disk space. And keep your original clips - the converted copy is for editing, not for archiving.

Rather skip the conversion? Kdenlive is built on FFmpeg and opens 4:2:2 camera files directly. For a mature free editor with pro colour tools, DaVinci Resolve is still the safe pick.

The Question Nobody Has Answered

HEVC and AV1 are covered by patents - one licensing pool alone lists more than 30,000 for HEVC. Many commercial apps license them, or rely on the decoder built into the operating system.

FilmCraft's GitHub page stresses there's "no GPL or LGPL code" inside (FFmpeg is LGPL or GPL, depending on how it's built), but it says nothing about patent licensing. Nobody has taken action against the project. For now, it's simply an open question worth watching.

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