You don't have to install OpenCut at all: you open opencut.app in a web browser on your computer, click Try early beta, start a new project and drop your clips in. There's no download and no account, and OpenCut's privacy page says all the editing happens on your device and your projects are kept in your browser, not on their servers. The one catch is the screen. The editor is built for a desktop, so on a phone or an iPad you get a Desktop only (for now) screen and the layout falls apart.
Now, if you've got a developer and you want your own copy, the OpenCut classic repo has the steps: clone it, run docker compose up -d with Docker installed, and it serves the editor on your own computer at localhost port 3100. I wouldn't bother just to cut clips, because that code was archived on May 17, 2026, so it's read-only and nobody's fixing bugs in it, and opencut.app runs that same classic version anyway. My step-by-step guide to editing in OpenCut for free walks through the first cut and the export.
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