CutSelects
CutSelects
CutSelects turns your selects timeline into individual, full-quality clips — losslessly, in one drag. Native frame rate and retiming intact, at a fraction of the size. No re-encode. No ProRes bloat.
Every one of them costs you quality, flexibility, or the shots themselves.
Keep all the camera media "just in case." Terabytes pile up on drives you keep buying and backing up. You never find anything again.
The classic: conform 60p into a 24p timeline, export ProRes 422 HQ. It re-encodes (quality off the original), bakes the slowdown in, and balloons the file ~10×.
Too much hassle, so the shots you loved never get pulled. Months later the footage is gone and the keepers went nowhere.
Keep the keepers — full quality, native frame rate, retiming intact — at a fraction of the size.
You already set the in/out points in your selects timeline. CutSelects just reuses them.
In Premiere: File ▸ Export ▸ Final Cut Pro XML from your selects sequence. That's the whole prep.
Drop the XML in. CutSelects lists every sequence; choose the selects timeline and an output folder.
Each select is stream-copied out as its own clip — same codec, same frame rate, named and ready to archive.
A 2021 shoot: 106 selects pulled from a Premiere timeline of 4K HEVC footage.
A true stream copy. The same bytes come out — no generation loss, ever.
We never conform. Native frame rate and full retiming headroom stay with you.
Long-GOP stream copy archives the keepers without the ProRes bloat.
Speaks selects and in/out points — not "consolidate used media." Mac-native.
Long-GOP footage can only cut on a keyframe, so each clip carries a few extra frames at the head. For archival selects that's a feature — free editing room. Frame-exact-to-the-sample means re-encoding, which we don't do.
DaVinci Resolve's media management and the free LosslessCut can get you part-way there. CutSelects is the one-drag, single-purpose tool for selects archiving — no Resolve round-trip, no scripting.
Free at launch, pay what you want. Drop your email and I'll send one note when it ships.
Yes — it's a stream copy (ffmpeg -c copy). The original video and audio packets are written straight through; nothing is re-encoded. Only the head snaps to the nearest keyframe, adding a few handle frames.
v1 targets the common case: long-GOP 4K from Sony / Canon / Panasonic / Blackmagic (HEVC & H.264) cut in a Premiere selects timeline. More NLEs and codecs follow.
At launch, anything that exports a Final Cut Pro 7 / XML (Premiere Pro does, today). A Premiere panel that reads your sequence live — no export — is on the roadmap.
Never. CutSelects only reads your source files and writes new clips to a folder you choose.
Mac first — that's where most editors are. Windows is on the list if there's demand.
Pay what you want at launch, including $0. A deeper Premiere plugin may be a paid upgrade later.