About

One person builds this

FirstCut exists because the first part of editing is still harder than it should be.

FirstCut is designed, built, and run by Eran Strassburg. There is no team behind the “we” on these pages. When something works, that's me. When something breaks, that's me too.

Why it exists

Hours of footage can hold dozens of possible stories, yet traditional editing forces you to discover the narrative on the timeline. You spend valuable time cutting before you even know what story you're telling.

FirstCut flips the process: understand and refine the narrative first, then build the video.

The idea is simple: the first pass shouldn't be about assembling a timeline. It should be about discovering the story.

How it works

FirstCut bridges the gap between the story you want to tell and the footage you have through narrative beats—simple descriptions of what happens at each point in the story.

Beats are quick to read and easy to reshape, so you can see the entire story at a glance, explore different directions, and change the flow without re-editing footage.

Each beat connects directly to the footage that tells it, keeping the story and source material aligned as you reshape the narrative. When you need more detail, you can dive from the story into the clips and transcripts behind it.

The story comes first

FirstCut treats a rough cut as something to explore, not something to accept. It can surface different narratives from the same footage, show the beats that make up those narratives, and connect each beat to the real clips—and the words inside them.

The goal isn't to replace the editor. It's to make the thinking part of editing faster, clearer, and easier to experiment with.

Built to be argued with

FirstCut makes a first draft. It will make choices you disagree with. That's intentional.

A useful first cut should give you something concrete to react to: move a beat, change a clip, cut a line, try another story. Keep the version you like and explore the next one.

The editor stays in control. FirstCut just gives you a better place to start.

One deliberate constraint

Your video never uploads. The footage stays on your computer, and the preview plays from it directly. Your browser extracts only the audio track and sends that for transcription.

That isn't an implementation detail. It's part of the product. Video footage is often private, unreleased, and enormous. I wanted FirstCut to work without asking you to hand over the original files.

Still a small product

FirstCut is an independent product, built and run by me. Support, bugs, and feature requests all go to the person who writes the code.

I'm building it one piece at a time, with the people who use it helping shape what comes next.

support@firstcut.video

What the service does and doesn't commit to is written down in the Terms, and what happens to your data is in the Privacy summary. Both are written in plain language on purpose.

Edit the story before you edit the video.

That's what FirstCut is trying to make possible.

What it does and doesn't do

• It selects; it doesn't generate. FirstCut is an independent product built on third-party speech-to-text and AI language-model providers, and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by them. The model picks and orders moments from your footage; it never creates images, video or audio. What it may be used for is in the Acceptable Use Policy.
• It's not storage. FirstCut never holds your video, which also means it can never give it back to you. Keep your own files and your own backups.

Who operates FirstCut