How to Run Your Entire Editing Toolkit Locally With SmoothyDesktop

The browser is a great place to start an edit. You paste a transcript or a link, and in seconds you have shorts, hooks, titles, and B-roll ideas — before you've even opened your NLE. But the browser also has limits. It can't reach into your timeline, it can't process video on your own hardware, and anything heavy has to make a round-trip to a server and back.

SmoothyDesktop is the answer to those limits: the entire Smoothy toolkit running natively on your machine, where it can do the things a browser tab never could.

One app instead of a stack of tabs and plugins

Most editing setups are a patchwork — a transcription service in one tab, a compression tool on the side, a captions add-on, a marker plugin, your NLE in the middle of it all. Every handoff between them is a manual step. SmoothyDesktop collapses that stack into a single native app that sits next to your editor and feeds it directly.

Everything in SmoothyEdit, running locally

You don't lose anything by moving off the web. SmoothyDesktop includes all 16 AI tools, plus history, projects, and the same models — just running on your machine, with zero round-trips when you don't need them:

• The full toolset. Find shorts, generate hooks, write titles and descriptions, suggest B-roll, plan thumbnails, and more — all driven by a single transcript.
• Your history and projects. The work you've done stays organized, the same way it does on the web.
• No browser tab required. It's a real application, not a website you keep open.

A direct bridge into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve

This is the part the browser simply can't do. A built-in plugin connects SmoothyDesktop directly to your NLE over a local connection, so the output lands on the timeline you're already editing in:

• Shorts markers drop onto the timeline, ready to cut.
• Multicam cuts come through as an edit you can refine, not a list of timestamps to transcribe.
• Caption tracks arrive aligned to the audio.

Both editors are first-class destinations — there's more on this in How to Send AI Cuts and Markers Straight to DaVinci Resolve.

Captions, silence, and export — handled on your machine

Because SmoothyDesktop runs locally, the heavy media work happens on your hardware instead of someone else's server:

• Local Whisper captions. Word-level SRT captions generated on-device. No upload, no rate limits, no API bill.
• Silence removal. Detect and trim dead air with configurable thresholds, then push the result back into your timeline as cuts — see How to Cut Dead Air From Your Videos Automatically.
• Hardware-accelerated encoding. Transcode and compress using NVENC, VideoToolbox, AMF, or QuickSync at full speed instead of CPU-bound, covered in How to Export and Compress Video Faster With Hardware Acceleration.
• Multicam auto-switch. Cameras follow whoever's speaking, generating a cut you refine instead of switching every angle by hand.

Why running local matters

Moving the toolkit onto your machine isn't just about convenience — it changes the economics and the privacy of every job:

• Privacy. For local features, the media never leaves your computer. That matters for client work, NDA footage, and unreleased projects.
• No rate limits. On-device processing isn't throttled by a per-minute quota.
• No per-minute bill. Caption a hundred videos or one — there's no transcription invoice attached.
• Full speed. Hardware acceleration means exports and transcodes run as fast as your machine allows.

Getting started

SmoothyDesktop is in active development and coming soon to the Smoothy suite. It's the native home for everything SmoothyEdit does, plus the local-only features a browser can't offer. See the SmoothyDesktop product page for the full feature set and to follow its progress.