FirstCut

FirstCut is a browser-based narrative editor for story-driven video, aimed at people editing interviews, documentaries, podcasts, courses, and webinars. It organizes footage into an editable narrative of beats, clips, and words instead of a timeline, so a creator can shape the story before producing a rough cut for a professional editor.

A user imports source footage, which FirstCut transcribes by uploading only the extracted audio, while the video itself stays on the user's computer. FirstCut analyzes the spoken material and generates a narrative arc made of beats and clips, which the user can reorder, edit, or regenerate, and an AI assistant turns plain-language instructions into changes on the sequence that play back immediately in the browser.

FirstCut works at four levels — narrative, beat, clip, and word — letting a user generate alternative story arcs from the same footage, reorder or edit beats, inspect the transcript behind each clip, and cut specific words or lines. Every meaningful change is saved as a new revision that can be compared or reverted, and the finished sequence exports to Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, or Media Composer with timecodes preserved.

FirstCut offers a free plan with 60 minutes of footage and 5 AI generations a month, with paid plans from $15 a month (Starter) to $99 a month (Studio) adding more media hours and generations, plus one-time top-ups at $3 per extra media hour or $15 per 50 extra AI cuts. It currently supports only English-language footage, works from the transcript rather than the picture, and does not offer team seats.

Use cases

• Build a narrative rough cut from a video podcast
• Skip the manual paper edit for interviews and documentaries
• Shorten webinars, courses, and lectures into focused edits
• Find the strongest moments in long interviews