Paper cut editor for documentary post-production

A written assembly of interview selects in the order you want them in the edit, with speaker labels, in/out timecodes, and the text of each quote. Editors call it a paper cut, a radio cut, or a paper edit depending on the tradition. The structure is the same.

Highlight the line in any transcript and use the "Send to paper cut" action. The select lands as a new row with speaker, timecodes, and source file linked.

The board lays acts across and beats down, so you can see that act two is carrying twice the running time of act three. The pace curve puts running time on one axis and how finely each stretch is cut on the other, which is where you spot a four-minute answer sitting in the middle of a fast sequence. The banded view gives each act a lane coloured by voice, so a lane held by one person reads as a slab and a real exchange reads as a weave. All three are computed from the same numbers as the Duration column, so they cannot disagree with the sheet.

Because the words in a cut were transcribed rather than typed. You are searching for what somebody said, through a machine's guess at how they said it, from your own memory of hearing it. "Alameda" comes back as "Alamedia" and a name is spelled three ways across four interviews, so an exact match finds none of it. Terms do not have to be adjacent or in order either, because people search a cut with two or three remembered words.

Yes, and on transcript passages and beats as well. Name a colleague in the note and it lands in their notifications with a link back to that row. Anyone who can open the document can leave a note, including viewers. Marking one resolved is an editorial call and needs edit rights.

Yes. The import wizard reads .docx, .xlsx, and .pdf paper cuts and maps each row to a select, attempting to auto-link to the source transcripts where it can.

It helps with reorganising, suggesting section headers, and trimming verbose selects. It does not rewrite a speaker's quotes. Those stay verbatim.

A version is a copy of the whole cut at a moment, kept so you can go back to it. A pass is per row: it records which round of the cut a bite arrived in, so a producer reading the sheet can tell the first assembly from what was added after the director's notes.

Scratch narration. A line of voice-over that has not been recorded yet can be read by a temporary synthetic voice so the assembly plays end to end, or you can record it yourself in the browser and have the noise cleaned up. Generated audio is flagged as generated, the feature is one of the project's AI switches, and it never replaces anything a subject said on tape.

Yes. The app installs to a phone's home screen and the paper cut plays back there as a radio cut, so a director can hear the assembly on the drive home without an export.

Yes. Export the sequence from Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Avid as FCP 7 XML and choose Import Edit from XML. Each clip is traced to the interview it came from, through SyncYard, a reference export or its file name, and filled with the words from the transcript. Consecutive clips of one answer become a single bite with a [...] where the gap is. Titles and graphics come through, and footage the project has not transcribed can be filled by adding the audio or video you exported from the edit. Each row keeps the burned-in timecode it had in the edit.

The same rows drawn as a document on white paper: the speaker, the words, the timecode over each bite and notes in the margin. Highlights, type and passes are set from the margin, and dashed rules show where a printed page will break. Switch back to the sheet and nothing has changed, because it is one set of rows drawn two ways. The Word export prints the same page.

Yes. Action history, in the Version menu, lists everything anyone has done to the cut, newest first and live as people work. Entries are in plain sentences, bursts of edits are folded into one line, and an entry about a row that is still in the cut takes you to it. It is a log of the steps between saved versions. Use a version when you need to go back.

Yes. New Folder in the Paper Cuts list groups cuts inside the project without touching the folders that hold your footage. You can also drag the sheet's columns into the order you read them in, link a duplicated bite to its original so a cross-out can tell a move from a cut, and copy a link to any row.