filmcraft/ROADMAP.md

FilmCraft Roadmap

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

Last updated: 2026-09-30 · Overall parity: ~27% · Code: ~57k lines of Rust, 300+ 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 + dynamic trimming, multicam, subclips, keyboard shortcut editor	10–15
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 basics, peak meters; DSP crate (LUFS, EQ, dynamics, reverb…) in progress	Mixers with automation, Essential Sound, audio transitions, 5.1	10–15
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 decoder (bit-exact on 41 fixtures) and Matroska/WebM in progress	VP9, AV1 (rav1d), DNxHR, MXF, hardware decode	20–30
M10	Graphics & captions	⬜	—	Text engine, Type tool, Essential Graphics, captions (SRT/VTT/SCC), speech-to-text	20–30
M11	Interchange & project management	🟡	.fcproj save/open	Autosave/recovery, FCP7 XML, FCPXML, EDL, OTIO, relink, project manager, proxies	15
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

• HEVC decoder (crates/hevc): synthetic-stream tests for tiles, PCM, dependent slices, long-term references
• Audio DSP (crates/audio-dsp): BS.1770 loudness, EQ, dynamics, limiter, reverb, delay, denoise, pitch
• Matroska/WebM demuxer (crates/matroska)

Log

• 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.