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Build a Rough Cut

How to rate your footage with Rough Cut and turn the ratings into cuts. Rough Cut reads your transcript and rates every sentence for whether it's worth keeping. It doesn't cut anything on its own. A second step, Apply Rough Cut…, turns those ratings into cuts at a strictness you choose.

Before you run Rough Cut​

Rough Cut works from the transcript, so every recording you want rated must be transcribed first. Media without a transcript is skipped, and the dialog tells you so. See Transcribe Your Footage.

Running Retakes… first is optional but recommended. When retake data exists, the Treat repeated takes as cuts checkbox (on by default) lets Rough Cut cut repeated takes too. Until then the checkbox is greyed out, and Rough Cut still runs fine without it.

Run Rough Cut​

  1. Open the Process menu and click Rough Cut….
  2. Under Engine, pick Agentic or Quick.
  3. Under Tracks, check the audio tracks you want rated. Tracks with nothing transcribed are greyed out. If exactly one track has transcripts, it's already checked for you.
  4. Click Run.

The run then works in the background like any other tool. See Run an AI Tool for progress, cancelling, and failures.

The two engines trade quality for speed:

  • Agentic is the default and carries a recommended tag. It gives the best quality and can propose trims inside sentences you keep, not just whole sentences. It's slower and less predictable, so the dialog shows its estimated time as a range rather than a single number. It needs the AI assistant signed in on this machine.
  • Quick cuts whole sentences only and gives a noticeably rougher result. It finishes in a few minutes and needs no sign-in.

Quick also runs automatically when Agentic isn't available. If that happens, a warning appears when the run finishes: the result uses whole-sentence cuts only, so fix the reported issue and re-run to get the Agentic result.

Watch an Agentic run​

While an Agentic run exists, the AI assistant panel gains a second tab named Rough Cut, next to Agent. The tab shows a dot while the run is active, and the app switches to it once when the run starts. It's watch-only. You can follow what the run is doing, but you can't type into it.

Apply the cuts​

When the run finishes, the sentence pills in the transcript take on colors from keep to cut, and the Rough Cut — Apply dialog opens on its own. If it doesn't, for example because another tool dialog was open, choose Process → Apply Rough Cut…. That menu entry stays greyed out until a run has produced ratings.

The dialog is a small floating panel, so the timeline stays visible behind it. As you change the settings, the timeline previews what would be cut: red regions for Lift and Ripple Delete, amber regions for Disable. A readout under the controls counts the sentences and the total time that would go.

  1. Set the Sensitivity slider. It has four stops, from Ultra Safe to Ultra Aggressive, and each stop explains its rule right on the dialog. Neutral is the default.
  2. Pick an Action. Lift is the default.
  3. Click Apply.

The three actions leave the timeline in different states:

  • Lift removes the cut spans and leaves gaps where they were. Everything after them keeps its position.
  • Ripple Delete removes the cut spans and slides the clips after them left, closing the gaps.
  • Disable removes nothing. Clips are split at the cut edges and the middle piece is turned off in place. Nothing moves and no gaps appear, and the disabled pieces are skipped during playback. You can turn them back on, or sweep them all later. See Cut and Delete.

Linked audio and video are always cut together. There is no option to leave one side behind. Where a cut lands in the middle of speech, a short audio fade is added automatically so the splice doesn't click.

Check for skipped cuts​

Some planned cuts are too small to make cleanly. Instead of forcing a bad splice, the app drops those cuts and marks each one on the timeline so nothing disappears silently. The marker is amber, carries a sparkle to show it came from an AI tool, and is named Cut skipped: no clean splice point. If every planned cut was skipped, nothing is applied and a message says so.

These are normal timeline markers. To remove one, right-click it and choose Delete Marker. See Markers for the rest of what you can do with them.

Undo an applied pass​

One press of Ctrl+Z undoes the entire applied pass in one step: the cuts, the automatic fades, and the skipped-cut markers.