Video Barbershop
A lightweight macOS desktop app for clipping and editing videos, designed especially for those that convert VHS tapes. Unique bulk clipping, editing and exporting features make Video Barbershop a must have addition to any video editing pipeline. It is not designed to replace your current editing pipeline, but to make many repetitive tasks faster and easier... especially when working with VHS... and may become your first step to creating assets to use in your pipeline. If you are new to video editing, however, and have been intimidated by the larger and more complicated suites, then Video Barbershop might also be exactly what you have been looking for! Powerful enough for the expert, simple enough for the novice.
No ads. No in-app purchases. No monthly fees. No tracking.
Just great software you buy once, that's simple to use, and packed with a ton of features focused on VHS videos!
Only $19.99
macOS 15.5+ (purchase from your desktop)
Video Barbershop is the greatest gift to VHS digitizers ever, probably. ... it’s downright amazing. It’s already saved me hours upon hours of effort clipping commercials from old broadcasts.
What Video Barbershop IS
A Unique Video Clipping System
Most other video salons are designed to create a single video. Video Barbershop is designed to create clips... lots of them!
A unique paradigm of managing videos and clips bookend your editing tools and preview player. Not just an asset library, it represents your exported workflow, allowing for quick and efficient clipping, cleaning and merging.
Magically Clip Commercial Breaks!
Have a VHS tape with commercials you want gone? Or are the commercials the best part?
Automatically detect and clip programs and commercials. Color code based on clip length to quickly review and remove unwanted content. Easily merge everything back into a single file, or export each clip separately!
Your VHS Tape Too Dark?
CRT TV signals compressed color values, leaving true blacks and whites for signal data and closed captioning. Your capture device may have just captured that raw compressed data, leaving you with dark and washed out video.
Video Barbershop features simple controls to correct your VHS tape! No need to buy expensive hardware for a better capture. Fix it in post.
Keyframe animation!
Don't let the modest theme of a simple barber mislead you to believe you can't do some pretty complex stuff with Video Barbershop. Most of the controls offer an Advanced Mode with extra tools revealed for those power users. A very simple set of controls allow you to keyframe animate right in that same interface.
You can duck out clicks from audio, animate popup text, have your watermark fade in or fly away... it's all there for you to get creative with! Heck, you can create flying windows and fading transitions if you get inventive and screenshot the last frame, set it as a watermark in the next clip and animate it away!
Metadata & Custom Reports
Custom metadata and a robust report template system let you manage your video library data beyond file export.
Create reports that generate YouTube chapter markers or format data for your preexisting database. Tracking your archive in a tab delimited Excel sheet? We got you.
It's a very simple markup language with function piping:
{{ metadata ? fallback > functions }}
The power comes in when piping functions together (str > func > func) and with leveraging recursive macros. All the power you need to format your video metadata and generate multiple types of reports.
Native macOS architecture
Built for macOS 15.5+ using Apple's powerful foundation for editing video.
Tested on an M1 Mac Mini from 2020, it's fast and modern, but not so much that we are leaving you behind with each version of OS and chipset Apple releases.
It's VERY lightweight, smaller than other editing suites by orders of magnitude. Seriously, note the file size on the App Store. 😉
That Mac Mini from a few years ago is just fine to run Video Barbershop... it's literally what I made it on.
As long as you have macOS 15.5 or newer, you should be good to go!
Is Video Barbershop just for VHS?
Heck NO!
Although I specifically built it to edit my taped off TV VHS collection, and built in features designed to solve many of the common issues you face when editing captured VHS, I also added in a ton of features to allow you to use Video Barbershop for many other editing needs. It is designed to create video assets you can use anywhere.
Edit transparent .MOV videos!
From the ground up I built Video Barbershop to be good at building and editing video assets. One such type of asset I had trouble editing in other video editors were transparent clips used in lower thirds or popups. So, I made sure Video Barbershop supports transparency at the very foundation.
You can fade clips to transparent. When you resize the video, it's layered over a transparent background. Changing aspect ratios and letterboxing your video... you guessed it... transparent letterboxing. Export to .MOV and it defaults to ProRes 4444, preserving the transparency for you.
You can apply all the same color effects to your transparent clips, apply audio filters to distort the sound, clip them shorter, or clip them into pieces and merge them back... and it all preserves the transparency, so you can leverage them in your other video editing salons as you would. Sure, you could do it in those too, but they aren't designed to do that as quickly and easily as Video Barbershop can.
Edit vertical portrait 4K videos!
Video Barbershop is great at importing iPhone videos that are in portrait mode, vertically aligned. You can then export them as 4K!
It can work in far many more dimensions than just the 640x480 you find from VHS. In fact, by default it exports in the same dimensions as the original video file itself. So even if you don't see the dimensions in the list... use "Same as Source" and it's golden.
Because Video Barbershop is designed to merge clips, it is more than capable of merging Full HD landscape 16:9 videos with VHS 4:3 videos with vertical 9:16 4K videos and letterboxing everything to fit whatever size you export to. Seriously. It just works.
Yeah, you read that right. 4K videos are supported in Video Barbershop. Heck, so is 160x120 QQVGA. Anyone can upscale to 4K... how about downscaling 4K to 160x120?!
Yes... yes you can. You should seek help, but yes, you can.
Export to an insane list of supported video dimensions!
By default, Video Barbershop letterboxes videos from one aspect ratio to another. You have full control but these dimensions are full interchangeable in Video Barbershop!
"Same as Source"
160 x 120 (QQVGA)
320 x 240 (QVGA)
640 x 480 (NTSC/VGA 4:3)
720 x 576 (PAL 4:3)
720 x 480 (WVGA)
800 x 480 (WVGA)
800 x 600 (SVGA)
854 x 480 (SD 480p)
960 x 720 (720p 4:3)
1024 x 768 (HD 4:3)
1280 x 720 (HD 720p)
1440 x 1080 (1080p 4:3)
1920 x 1080 (Full HD)
2048 x 1080 (IMAX 2K/Xenon)
3840 x 2160 (4K UHD)
480 x 480 (Square 480p 1:1)
512 x 512 (Square 512p 1:1)
720 x 720 (Square 720p 1:1)
1024 x 1024 (Square 1K 1:1)
1080 x 1080 (Square 1080p 1:1)
2048 x 2048 (Square 2K 1:1)
720 x 1280 (Portrait HD 720p)
1080 x 1350 (Portrait Instagram 4:5)
1080 x 1920 (Portrait Full HD 1080p)
1440 x 2560 (Portrait QHD+ 9:16)
2160 x 3840 (Portrait 4K UHD)
What Video Barbershop IS NOT
Video Barbershop is NOT a multi-track editing suite designed to layer audio and video assets in overlapping transitions and state-of-the-art effects with AI prompting. It's designed to make the clips you use in those video suites. By design.
It does have many common features like text overlay, watermarking, keyframe lerping of settings, fades, and even replacing the video with static images or a background... so you can leverage Video Barbershop as your primary video editor for many simple editing tasks, absolutely, but it was never designed to replace other larger suites... or video salons, as I like to call them... for complex multi-track layering. Think of it as your video barber, and not your video salon. Quick and clean cuts, easily and quickly. Minutes instead of hours.
Most larger video salons are designed to create one video. You need to setup a project, manage clips all over tracks, use menus, submenus to find the things you want, lose them, yell at the UI and why did that panel just disappear... Sure, a video from a salon can walk the red carpet after and be admired by millions of fans, but it takes a whole day to prep for that. So when you need to walk the grocery aisle in your pajamas to grab 6 tubs of ice cream, why are you going to a video salon?
Your video barber can get you in and out and looking great the other 95% of your editing needs.
Video Barbershop is a companion to your video editing pipeline, made by someone who is very lazy and got really tired of how slow and tedious it was to do the simplest of things in a salon that was designed for industry professionals... and everything seemed to be a work around for simple VHS based projects. I just needed something simple, fast and effective for bulk cleaning and exporting of clips, so I could make clip compilation videos from VHS tapes. It worked so well, I continued to design it so I could make those compilations directly in Video Barbershop as well.
I might have added more features than any sane person will actually ever use (the metadata custom report template markup language I created is really slick, but a stack and recursive function calls might have been a bit over the top, sure)... but man, this thing is so fun to use... you can do some pretty great things with it VERY quickly... you'll see...
Video Barbershop
Download on your desktop for macOS
Currently available via Apple's macOS App Store for only $19.99! I hope you give it a try and add it to your video editing pipeline. I've lovingly crafted it and am very proud. If you edit VHS, I know you'll find something in there for your pipeline that is totally worth the one ATM money unit it costs. As more people use it and send me feedback it will just keep getting better and better, so grab a copy now and help support its existence and future development! Thank you very much.