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.
50d198fc6aef90f227a54ede5a6307488e577b4c207ff6213609866d17a3d996Every 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.
CutSelects ships without an Apple Developer ID, so macOS stops it once. You approve it once — about thirty seconds — and from then on it opens like any other app.
Open the .dmg, drag CutSelects into Applications, eject the disk image.
Double-click CutSelects. macOS says “Apple could not verify ‘CutSelects’ is free of malware…” with Done and Move to Trash. Click Done. (Don't trash it.)
System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security. A line reads “CutSelects” was blocked to protect your Mac. Click Open Anyway.
Touch ID or your password, then Open Anyway once more in the confirmation dialog.
CutSelects launches, and macOS won't ask again for this version. (The old right-click ▸ Open trick no longer works reliably on recent macOS — use the steps above.)
That's the download at fault, not your Mac — a sealed build never says that. Re-download and check the SHA-256 against the one on this page (it's in the download email too), or write to hello@cutselects.com with your macOS version.
Clear the download flag on this one app. In Terminal (Applications ▸ Utilities):
xattr -cr /Applications/CutSelects.appThen double-click the app. This removes only the “downloaded from the internet” marker on CutSelects
— nothing system-wide changes. Never run spctl --master-disable; that switches Gatekeeper
off for everything.
Notarization needs a paid Apple Developer membership. CutSelects is free, direct from cutselects.com, and every release is a complete, sealed bundle: macOS verifies it hasn't been tampered with since it was built — it just can't tie it to an Apple-registered developer.
Free, pay what you want. Drop your email and the download link lands in your inbox — with the checksum and the first-launch steps. One note per release after that, nothing else.
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 — Apple silicon, macOS 15 or newer. That's where most editors are. Windows is on the list if there's demand.
Yes — that's the standard notice for an app that isn't notarized with Apple, not a verdict on the download. Every release is a sealed bundle, and the SHA-256 on this page and in the download email lets you check yours. Approve it once in Privacy & Security: the first-launch steps.
The download link arrives by email, so it's tied to a real address: that's how I send you the next release and how I know who's actually using it. The link works for a day; ask again any time. One note per release, nothing else, and a reply unsubscribes you.
Pay what you want at launch, including $0. A deeper Premiere plugin may be a paid upgrade later.