A team of University of Waterloo engineering students (Justin Wu, Lucas Jin, Owen Li, Thomas Lenh) has released Vit, a free, open-source tool that brings Git-style version control (GitHub, if you’re more familiar with it) to video editing. Instead of passing project files back and forth on hard drives or waiting for one editor to finish before the next can start, Vit lets editors, colourists, and sound designers work on the same timeline in parallel using branches, then merge their changes together at the end, just like software developers do with code.

we just built git for video editing. pic.twitter.com/ldSvzDkATE

— Lucas Jin (@lucashjin) March 25, 2026

What Vit Actually Does

Vit works by serialising your DaVinci Resolve timeline into lightweight JSON metadata files. It does not version your raw footage or media. Instead, it tracks the creative decisions: clip placements, colour grades, audio levels, effects, transitions, and markers. Git handles all the versioning under the hood, and your team shares changes through a standard GitHub repository, so there is no new infrastructure or accounts required.

The clever part is how Vit splits the timeline data across domain-specific files. Each role on a production team owns a different file, which means Git can merge them without conflicts in most cases.

Domain File Breakdown

Because different people edit different files, parallel work rarely creates merge conflicts. When cross-domain issues do arise, such as one branch deleting a clip while another colour-grades it, Vit includes an AI-powered semantic merge system that analyses the conflict and proposes a resolution.

The Problem Vit Solves

Professional video production has long been a sequential process. The editor finishes a cut, hands it off to the colourist, who finishes and hands it off to the sound designer. Everyone waits their turn. As Vit creator put it on X, “video editing is very sequential” and new AI video editing tools do not solve this because they do not integrate with pre-existing software.

Software developers solved this exact workflow bottleneck decades ago with Git and GitHub. Video editors, until now, had no equivalent. The only comparable tools on the market have been enterprise-grade solutions costing thousands per month, as one Product Hunt commenter noted. Vit is free, open-source under the MIT licence, and built entirely on top of Git and GitHub, so teams can start using it with tools they likely already have.

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How To Set Up Vit: Step-By-Step Tutorial

Vit requires Python 3.8 or later, Git, and optionally DaVinci Resolve for the in-editor integration. Here is how to get everything running from scratch.

Installing Vit

On macOS or Linux, a one-line install handles everything:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LucasHJin/vit/main/install.sh | bash

Alternatively, you can install manually by cloning the GitHub repo and running pip install. If you want the optional Qt-based GUI panel inside Resolve, install with the qt extra using pip install ".[qt]". After installation, run vit install-resolve to symlink the plugin scripts into DaVinci Resolve.

Starting A New Project (Lead Editor)

Before anything else, create an empty GitHub repository with no README or licence file. This repo is how your team shares timeline changes. Your footage needs to be shared separately through whatever method your team already uses, whether that is a shared drive, Dropbox, or a local server. Vit only tracks edit decisions, not raw video.

In your terminal, initialise the project and connect it to your GitHub remote:

vit init my-project

cd my-project

vit collab setup

When prompted, paste your empty repo URL. Then open DaVinci Resolve, load your project and timeline, and open the Vit Panel from Workspace, then Scripts, then Vit Panel. Hit Save Version to create the first snapshot. Vit serialises the timeline to JSON and commits it. Send the clone URL that your terminal prints to your collaborators.

Joining An Existing Project (Collaborators)

Collaborators clone the project from GitHub using the URL provided by the lead editor:

vit clone https://github.com/yourname/your-repo.git

cd your-repo

vit checkout main

Open Resolve, run the Vit Panel, choose Switch Branch, select your footage folder, and relink any offline clips. Then create your own branch with vit branch your-name. From this point forward, everything happens inside the panel.

The Daily Workflow

Once the project is set up, the day-to-day workflow happens entirely within the DaVinci Resolve panel. Pull to fetch the latest changes from the team. Switch Branch to restore the timeline to your branch. Edit in Resolve as you normally would. When you are ready, hit Save Version to serialise and commit your changes, then Push to share your work with the team.

Merging Work Together

When it is time to combine everyone’s work, the lead editor pulls all the latest commits, switches to the main branch, and uses the Merge function in the panel to select which branch to bring in. The panel shows a diff summary and, if a Gemini API key is configured, uses AI to recommend a merge strategy. For complex cross-domain conflicts, Vit offers a full AI-assisted resolution flow through the CLI using vit merge <branch>.

AI-Powered Features Under The Hood

Vit uses the Gemini API to handle tasks that go beyond what plain Git can manage. The standout feature is semantic merge resolution. When a merge creates cross-domain conflicts, the AI analyses the base, ours, and theirs states across all domain files and produces structured per-domain decisions with confidence levels. For ambiguous merges where the AI is not confident, it presents options to the user before committing anything.

Beyond merging, Vit can auto-generate descriptive commit messages from the timeline diff using video editing terminology, produce natural-language summaries of recent commit history for the team, and auto-categorise commits as audio, video, or colour changes. All AI features are optional and degrade gracefully. Vit works fully without a Gemini API key; you just lose the smart merge and suggestion capabilities.

Early Reception And What Comes Next

The project has already gained significant traction since launching. Lucas Jin’s announcement on X has pulled in over two million views, and the tool has attracted 171 followers on Product Hunt. Owen Li described the team’s motivation simply: professional video production is broken because editors, colourists, and sound designers work sequentially, and software developers solved this thirty years ago with Git while video editors had nothing.

The team is not currently accepting external pull requests, but the project is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub for anyone to fork and build on independently. For production teams looking to move away from sequential editing workflows, Vit offers a genuinely practical solution that slots directly into DaVinci Resolve without requiring expensive subscriptions or new infrastructure beyond a free GitHub account.

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