Directing

You direct Cutwright the way you would brief an editor: say what the cut is for, then react to what it proposes. The director reads the footage, never sees it, and changes the cut only by proposals you approve.

Say what the cut is for

The more the director knows about the purpose, the less it has to guess. Give it the length, who will watch, what must stay and what can go, and the people by name and role. One paragraph is enough. This is the brief of one of Cutwright's tests on a real meeting, word for word:

This is the 21-minute kick-off meeting of a four-person design team: Laura (project manager, she chairs), David (industrial designer), Craig (user interface) and Andrew (marketing). Cut it into a tight episode of about 8 minutes for someone who missed the meeting: keep the introductions, the project brief and what they decide, drop housekeeping, false starts and tangents, keep whole thoughts and the laughs. Follow whoever is talking with their close-up and use the corner wide for crosstalk. Put a lower third with name and role on each of the four people the first time they speak in the cut. Then make three 9:16 shorts of the best moments for social media, each its own edit, with burned-in word-by-word captions, and give each a one-line reason. Render everything, check everything you made, and tell me plainly what you checked and what you could not.

It read the meeting, wrote an outline, and cut an 8:08 episode in 21 segments, each with a reason: the introductions, the brief and the ice-breaker with its laughs kept to their ends; the projector, the attendance and the after-meeting chat gone. It put each name on its person's first sustained words with their close-up held under it, and spelled Craig right where the transcript heard "Greg". It made three shorts (a dog chasing its tail, the brief, David's fish) with word-by-word captions, then rendered and heard each of the four, mic by mic: no clicks at any of the episode's 31 joins, none of its 1,481 words clipped. It said what it had checked and what it had not, and left the choice of a cold open to the person.

The edit keeps your brief as you said it, beside the director's reading of it, so a later conversation starts from the same purpose.

What you can ask

Anything an editor would understand. These are the kinds of thing Cutwright does, each with the page that explains it.

The cut

Tighten the storm answer: take out the fillers and the false start, but keep the pause before she says it took the old one.

Open cold on the storm line, then go to the introductions.

Make it about six minutes. Lose the tangent about the projector.

See Cutting.

Dressing it

Dress it: names on people, a card for each chapter.

Put the sponsor's card before the first segment, and our logo in the corner the whole way through.

Lay the theme under the introductions and let it go when Laura starts the brief.

Add the Spanish captions and chapters.

See Dressing the show.

From one recording, many pieces

Find three shorts of the best moments, 30 to 60 seconds, vertical, with captions.

Write the titles, a description and chapters for YouTube, and pick a thumbnail.

Put a Marigold gag after the ice-breaker.

See Shorts, the publish kit and cartoons from Reelwright.

Questions

Where does David talk about the battery?

Which take of the intro is best, and why?

Is anyone talking over the cut at 3:12?

The director answers from the index, with times, before it changes anything.

What the director reads

It starts every conversation with the project in one page: the people, the cameras and mics, what the index holds, the edits, and what waits for your decision. Then it reads, the way an editor scrubs:

The transcript, a page of sentences at a time with who says each, and a search for where something is said.
Takes: repeated attempts at the same line, ranked with reasons (no fillers, no stumble, the pace, the level).
Who has the floor when, where people talk over each other, and each person's talk time.
The sounds that are not words: laughter and applause (to protect), breaths, silence and room tone (safe places to cut).
How each source sounds and looks: loudness, noise, clipping, sharpness, exposure, and words heard with low confidence.
A close look at a cut before it commits to it: the words either side with the pause before each, the safe places to cut, who is talking, and a frame from each camera at that moment.

On anything long it writes an outline first: the chapters, the beats inside them, the quotes worth keeping, the tangents that could go. The outline is your map as well as its own, and chapters, graphics and the publish kit are made from it.

How a proposal reads

The director changes a cut only by proposing operations, each with a reason you will read: start a new edit, add a segment from one word to another, remove a filler, move a segment, set a transition, put a graphic on. One idea a proposal: "cut the fillers from the storm answer", "open cold on the storm line".

A proposal shows you:

The program as it would play, with every word that goes ~~struck through~~.
The cut list: every cut, the camera on each side and why it chose it.
Flags: a cut with no pause beside it, someone talking across it, a thought cut short, a cut just before a laugh, a graphic too short to read. The director fixes what it can, or tells you why a flag stays.

It never types a time. A cut names a word's start or end, a shot or a movement, and Cutwright places it on an exact frame, in the pause beside the word. It cannot cut inside a word.

Every edit and every proposal is listed with what waits for you and what was applied lately, and any proposal can be read in full: its operations and reasons, the cut list after it, and the changed segments as they would play.

Your decisions

Five things change your project, and only you decide them. The director may ask, but it may take one only when you have asked for that exact decision in your own words.

Approve applies a proposal: the edit is checked once more, written whole or not at all, and committed to the project's history.
Reject declines it; it stays in the history as rejected.
Undo applies the inverse of an approved change as a new change. History is never rewritten, and the edit comes back exactly as it was.
Lock a segment, or the whole edit, and nothing changes it until you unlock it. The director never asks you to unlock something to make its own work easier.

In the Studio these are the buttons on each proposal; in Claude Code you say them.

Voices on a shared mic

When several people share a microphone, Cutwright tells their voices apart and calls each one it cannot name "Speaker 2", "Speaker 3". The director never puts a name to a voice itself: it asks you, and records your answer. From the command line:

cutwright speakers my-show
cutwright speakers name my-show speaker_2 laura

It checks its own cut

Before the director calls a cut done, it does three things, and you can ask for any of them at any time:

Render a preview, with each mic kept as a stem of its own. A long cut takes minutes, so it runs in the background while the director keeps working.
Check it: every anchor resolves, every cut has a pause and nobody talking across it, the length against the brief, the graphics as they are drawn, and then the render itself, heard again mic by mic for lost, clipped and added words, listened to for clicks at every join, measured for loudness and dead air, and looked at for how much of the picture holds still and how much shows the footage.
Critique it: pauses kept, the pace of each segment, thoughts cut short, graphics over faces, how much of the program the story fills, each with a time, and a rubric it answers by looking.

Its report quotes the check's own lists, Checked and Not checked, as they are. It never says "done", "fixed" or "smooth" about something no check showed it.