Version 3.9.0 May 26, 2026

Face Framing, Export Load Presets & Release Hardening

Auto face crop for video overlays, export load presets, captions editor performance fixes, safer project loading, and stronger release gates.

Velocaption 3.9.0 is the current launch build. It improves face-aware crop work, export load control, captions-editor performance, and project recovery, so new buyers start from the most stable Mac build available today.

Why it matters

Faster caption-heavy editing - crop, selection, and overlay paths do less repeated work during review.
More predictable exports - load presets make the export job match the Mac you are working on.
Safer project loading - invalid reads preserve the project file and tell you no changes were made.

Features

Frame Face in crop mode - added on-device face framing for video overlays in captions crop mode. It proposes a crop around the detected face and only changes the overlay when you apply it.
Export load presets - added Eco, Balanced, Performance, and Custom export load profiles so you can choose quieter, balanced, or faster caption exports without changing output quality.
Collapsed sidebar group reveal - clicking a collapsed sidebar group now opens the group you asked for instead of snapping back to the active route’s group.
Safer project loading - legacy project data is normalized before schema validation, and invalid project reads now fail with explicit “no changes were made” language instead of silently replacing the project.

Improvements

Captions editor panel cleanup - simplified sidebar and inspector scrolling in the touched captions surfaces so long crop and inspector panels are less likely to trap controls.
Large caption selection performance - cached phrase-selection membership and segment lookup indexes so “select all captions” no longer repeatedly scans the same selected-id lists.
Preview and overlay interaction performance - reduced frame-tick allocations for active caption resolution and switched selected overlay checks to set-based lookups during overlay rendering and multi-select drag/resize.
Appearance sound hardening - tightened appearance-sound resolution and type narrowing so missing generated preset assets fail closed.

Bug Fixes

Face crop fallback behavior - no-face, unavailable, and error states leave the current crop draft unchanged and report the problem without destructive side effects.
Project read failures - parse, read, and schema failures now preserve the project file instead of falling back to an empty project except for the specific missing-file case.
Remotion overlay compatibility - updated video overlays away from the deprecated startFrom prop to the current trim API.
Sidecar signing reliability - release scripts now strip stale sidecar signatures, clear extended attributes, re-sign bundled FFmpeg, Whisper, Node, and Deep Filter binaries, and verify them before Tauri packaging.

Operations

Version bump - synchronized the app version to 3.9.0 across package.json, src-tauri/Cargo.toml, src-tauri/Cargo.lock, and src-tauri/tauri.conf.json.
Release confidence gates - expanded automated release checks across metadata, navigation, updater state, missing-media cleanup, fatal-error surfaces, restart fallback behavior, and release artifact validation.
Prerelease coverage - added regression coverage for captions shortcuts, shared timeline scroll/scrub/zoom hooks, filmstrip extraction, resize/trim math, transcript review navigation, buffering detection, silence segment lookup, and crop-mode face framing branches.

Tests

Passed tsc --noEmit, ./scripts/prerelease-check.sh, the full frontend Vitest coverage suite, targeted ESLint for touched release-audit files, the focused release-delta suites, cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml, production Vite build, pnpm test:release-gates, and release-readiness checks.
Added post-build artifact validation for bundle metadata, updater archive and signature, DMG naming, Developer ID signing, and notarized DMG acceptance.