Bring the footage. Direct the cut.

What it does

You bring the recordings of a conversation: a podcast, an interview, a panel, a meeting. Any number of cameras and microphones, shot together. Cutwright makes three things from them:

• An index of everything in the footage: every word with who said it and when, the pauses and breaths, laughs and applause, the shots, the faces in frame and what moves.
• An edit: the cut, as a list of stretches of the recording named by their words, with the graphics, music, captions and B-roll over it. You never type a timecode, and neither does the director: it names words and shots, and Cutwright places every cut on an exact frame and sample, in a pause.
• The program: a render at broadcast loudness, files for Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut, captions, and a kit for posting.

Your footage stays where it is and is never changed. Everything else lives in a project folder with its own history, so every change can be undone.

How a cut is made

1. Bring the footage. Make a project and add your files. Cutwright syncs every camera and mic onto one clock by their sound.
2. Let it listen and look. It builds the index: the words, the speakers, the sounds and the shots.
3. Say what the cut is for. The length, the audience, what must stay. The director reads the index, writes an outline, and proposes the cut one idea at a time.
4. Read and decide. Each proposal shows the words that go, struck through, with a reason for every change and a flag for every risk. Approve it, reject it, or ask for something else. You can undo any of it later.
5. It checks its own work. Before the director tells you it is done, it renders the cut, listens to it again word by word, and measures it. It tells you what it checked and what it could not.
6. Take it out. Render it, or hand it to your editing app with its graphics on their own tracks.

Getting started

Cutwright is in development and is not offered for download yet. The steps below are how it runs today, from the command line, with the director in Claude Code on your own Claude plan.

cutwright init my-show --rate 30000/1001 --size 1920x1080
cutwright ingest my-show cam-a.mp4 cam-b.mp4 mic-host.wav mic-guest.wav
cutwright index my-show
cutwright claude connect my-show
cd my-show && claude

init makes the project folder with its own git history. ingest probes and hashes each file, makes proxies, extracts the sound and syncs every source by it; cutwright sources lists them and how each was placed, and sources sync places one by hand when the sound cannot. index builds the index (index status says which parts are done). claude connect sets Claude Code up for the project, so that claude, run in the folder, is the director: it serves Cutwright's tools to Claude over MCP (cutwright mcp), and claude status says whether it is set up. Then say what you want. cutwright transcript prints what is said, a sentence a line, if you want to read it yourself first.

Or open the Studio in your browser: drop in a folder of footage and it is indexed and synced in the page, and its director pane talks to Claude on your own API key. The Studio has more.

In this guide

• DirectingWhat to ask, with real examples, and how proposals and decisions work.
• CuttingWords and pauses, cameras, framing, cutting on action, colour, sound, speed.
• Dressing the showGraphics, captions, credits, music, B-roll, your artwork, translations, cartoons, shorts.
• The StudioIts panes and keys, reviewing a proposal, editing in the transcript.
• Render and exportThe render, the checks, and every file format it writes.
• What it needsComputers, the director, the models, and where things are kept.

The reference lists every tool, operation, command and key, read from Cutwright's own source.