15:49Greg Edits Video · Tutorial
The Only 3 Transitions You Need to Edit Any Video
A professional editor draws a hard line at three transition types — and argues the real skill is knowing when to use none of them.
July 7thThe argument in one line.
The tedious first pass of editing (finding the ums, the false starts, and the best of five repeated takes) can be automated entirely on-device, while every creative decision about pacing, structure, and story stays with the editor, not the AI.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You edit talking-head footage (courses, interviews, podcasts, YouTube videos) and dread the first pass of removing ums, dead air, and repeated takes.
- You work with client footage, unreleased products, or NDA material and don't want raw footage leaving your machine.
- You already finish videos in Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Premiere Pro and want a faster on-ramp into that timeline, not a replacement for it.
- You've tried AI editing tools that wanted to generate your script or clips and felt like they were taking over creative decisions you wanted to keep.
SKIP IF…
- You're on Windows — the app is Mac-only (Apple Silicon, macOS 26) as of this video, though a Windows waitlist exists.
- You want an AI tool that writes or generates footage for you rather than cleaning up footage you already shot.
The full version, fast.
Editing talking-head footage always starts with the same boring pass: finding the ums, false starts, and best of five repeated takes before any creative editing can happen. PowerCut automates just that pass, fully on-device on a Mac. Drop in footage and it transcribes locally, strikes obvious dead weight and production notes, and flags a best take among repeats you can review and override. You then edit the story by editing a transcript like a document: strike a sentence to cut it, drag a paragraph to reorder it, search a phrase to find every instance. Nothing is destructive and nothing is uploaded. When the read is right, export a frame-accurate multicam project straight into Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Premiere Pro to finish the creative edit as usual. It also handles find-and-replace across a transcript, markers and keywords that sync into your NLE, CSV export of favorites, and on-device translation into English across 13 languages.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:25
01 · The problem with rough cuts
Sifting through raw footage to find the ums, false starts, and best of five repeated takes is tedious but unavoidable before real editing starts. Other AI editing tools went a different direction: uploading footage to generate scripts and clips and locking editors inside their editor, on a subscription.
01:25 – 02:48
02 · The core idea: edit footage like a document
PowerCut's premise: striking a sentence in a transcript removes it from the video, dragging a paragraph reorders the footage with it, and searching a phrase jumps to every instance across the timeline.
02:48 – 04:37
03 · Import and the Auto Edit Pass
Dragging in 72 raw clips (1 hour 40 minutes of footage) starts real-time on-device transcription, about 20 minutes of footage per 20 seconds, with nothing uploaded. The pass also strips production notes like 'let's do that again' when they don't fit the story.
04:37 – 06:23
04 · Paper editing: reviewing takes and non-destructive strikes
PowerCut flags a best take among repeated lines as a suggestion, not a final decision; every take can be reviewed and swapped. An hour and 15 minutes of raw footage became a 12-minute first pass automatically.
06:23 – 07:40
05 · Export to Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Premiere Pro
Export produces a frame-accurate multicam (or nested-sequence) timeline referencing the original media, not a new render, so multicam angles and color grading still work exactly as before.
07:40 – 09:22
06 · Document view, find-and-replace, and transcript export
A standard document view of the same transcript (with or without strikethrough cuts) works for producers and clients. Misspellings can be fixed once and corrected across the whole document, and PowerCut remembers the fix for future transcripts.
09:22 – 10:43
07 · 13-language on-device translation
PowerCut transcribes 13 languages locally and can translate a transcript into English for editing, while keeping the edit attached to the original spoken-language timestamps so the cut never breaks.
10:43 – 12:10
08 · Markers, favorites, keywords, and CSV export
Final Cut and DaVinci keyboard habits carry over into the transcript view (F marks a favorite), and markers, favorites, and keywords export to CSV with source timecodes for organizing footage in the NLE.
12:10 – 13:43
09 · Why on-device matters, and the pitch
The presenter closes on why footage never leaving the machine mattered for his own client and NDA work, then pitches PowerCut directly: one-time purchase, no subscription, no upload limit, seven-day fully functional free trial.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The tedious part of editing talking-head footage isn't the creative decisions, it's finding the ums, false starts, and best of five repeated takes before any real editing can start.
- Many AI editing tools drifted from cleaning up footage toward becoming full generation platforms that write scripts, generate clips, and lock footage inside their own editor.
- Editing a transcript like a document (strike a sentence, drag a paragraph) replaces scrubbing a timeline and guessing where a line lives.
- PowerCut transcribed 72 raw clips totaling an hour and 40 minutes in about a minute, roughly 20 minutes of footage per 20 seconds, fully on-device.
- The auto-cut pass looks past ums and silences for production notes too, skipping lines like 'that was a good take, let's do that again' when they don't fit the surrounding story.
- For one video, PowerCut cut an hour and 15 minutes of raw footage down to a 12-minute first pass before any manual editing began.
- Every automatic cut is shown as a non-destructive strike you can review and restore, and every best-take pick can be overridden by reviewing the other takes.
- Export produces a frame-accurate multicam timeline (or nested sequence in Premiere) referencing the original media, not a new baked-in render, so color grades and multicam angles still work normally.
- A standard document view of the same transcript lets producers or clients review the full script, with or without the strikethrough cuts, independent of the editor's working view.
- Fixing a misspelled word once in the transcript can propagate the correction across the whole document and be remembered for future transcripts.
- PowerCut transcribes 13 languages locally and can translate the transcript into English while keeping the edit attached to the original spoken-language timestamps, so translation never breaks the cut.
- Final Cut Pro and DaVinci keyboard habits carry over: pressing F marks a favorite in the transcript exactly like it does on a normal timeline, and markers/keywords/favorites export to a CSV with source timecode.
- PowerCut is a one-time purchase with a 7-day fully functional free trial and no subscription, positioned directly against subscription-based AI editing tools.
Automate the cleanup pass, not the creative decisions
WHAT TO LEARN
The most defensible use of AI in a creative workflow is removing the mechanical, low-judgment steps between raw material and the first real decision, while leaving every judgment call to the human.
- The tedious part of a workflow is often not the hard part. Finding an um or a repeated take isn't a hard editing decision, it's just a slow one, and slow-but-easy tasks are the best automation candidates.
- A tool that keeps footage or data entirely on-device removes a real adoption barrier for anyone working with client material, unreleased products, or NDA content, not just a privacy nicety.
- Showing every automatic decision as reversible (a strike you can restore, a take you can swap) builds trust in an automated first pass faster than a black-box result would.
- Letting a tool's suggestion be overridden, and having it learn from those overrides, keeps a human in the loop without requiring them to redo the whole pass by hand.
- Exporting to the format of the tool people already use to finish their work (rather than trying to become the finishing tool) removes the switching cost that kills adoption of a new step in an existing workflow.
- One-time-purchase pricing with a genuinely full-featured trial is a specific, statable counter-positioning against a wave of subscription-based competitors, not just a price choice.
Terms worth knowing.
- Rough cut
- The first assembled pass of a video, with the obvious dead weight (silences, false starts, filler words) removed but the creative edit not yet done.
- Paper edit
- Editing a video by rearranging and marking up its written transcript rather than scrubbing the video timeline directly, a technique borrowed from documentary and news editing.
- Auto Edit Pass
- PowerCut's automatic first pass over raw footage: it strikes silences, filler words, false starts, and off-topic production notes, and flags a best take among repeated lines.
- Best take picking
- PowerCut's suggestion of which of several repeated takes of the same line sounds best, shown as an editable choice the editor can review and override, not a final decision.
- Multicam timeline
- An editing timeline that keeps multiple synced camera angles (or a screen share) grouped together so an editor can switch angles non-destructively while finishing the edit.
- Non-destructive edit
- An edit that hides or marks footage as cut without deleting or re-rendering the original media, so any cut can be reversed at any point.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“The worst part of editing isn't editing. It's sifting through 50 minutes of footage to make an eight minute video.”
02:54
“What if editing talking head footage felt more like editing a document?”
05:13
“None of these are difficult editing decisions. They're just tedious ones.”
12:52
“I don't want AI to make my video. I want AI to give me back that hour I used to waste before the real editing even started.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
analogy
The worst part of editing isn't editing. It's sifting through 50 minutes of footage to make an eight minute video. And before you can actually start editing, you have to go through all these simple, boring decisions.
Remove the pauses, the ums, the false starts, five versions of the exact same sentence and finding the best one. And the most annoying part is that you know that most of this stuff is already going to be deleted, but you still have to sit there and find it. I've been editing professionally for over 20 years, and this is still one of my least favorite parts of the process.
And for a long while, I kept waiting for somebody else to build the tool that I actually wanted, something that would handle this first boring pass for me, but keep everything securely on my Mac and then just hand me a rough cut that I can start the creative process with. I don't want AI to make my videos. I wanted to get the boring stuff out of my way.
I still want to decide what stays. and what goes. But a lot of the tools that I was watching started going in a completely different direction.
They all seemed to want to become an AI generation platform. They wanted you to upload your footage and your scripts to who knows where. They wanted to write the video, generate new clips for me, keep me inside their editor, and eventually make more and more of the creative decisions themselves.
And they wanted to charge for this every single month for the rest of time. And that wasn't what I wanted. And when I'm done with the rough cut, I want to take it back to Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Premiere and finish the video the way I always have.
So I stopped waiting and I built the tool myself. This is Power Cut. It takes you from raw footage to rough cut in minutes.
It can take talking head footage, transcribe it locally on your Mac, remove the obvious dead weight and gives me something I can actually work from. Instead of staring at a timeline and waveform and guessing what's being said, I can read my edit.
The core idea behind Power Cut is actually very simple. What if editing talking head footage felt more like editing a document? I don't want this sentence.
Strike it. And it's gone from the video. I changed my mind.
I can just bring it back. And maybe I like this thought, but I think it belongs earlier in the video. I can just drag that whole paragraph up here and the footage moves with it.
I'm actually editing based on this transcript right now. I can just move this paragraph here and the footage moves with it. So I'm still making the creative decisions, but instead of scrubbing through the entire timeline, trying to remember where everything is, I'm reading.
Or better yet, I can just look for a phrase and I can find all the instances in the transcript and jump to all those at any point. And especially with talking head videos, podcasts, interviews, courses, pretty much anything where the story is mostly driven by what someone is saying this changes the way you approach the first edit completely and where power cut actually really shines is if you have lots of clips so in this folder i have 72 raw clips i can just drag it in and it'll automatically start transcribing in real time There's an hour and 40 minutes of footage here and it's transcribing in real time.
And per clip, it can transcribe about 20 minutes of footage in about 20 seconds right on your device. It's not uploading it anywhere. It's not storing it anywhere.
It's all saved securely on the device. And that was actually really important for me and for the kind of work that I do. So all the clips have been transcribed in about a minute.
So not only does Power Cut cut out the ums and ahs and filler words, but it also looks for production notes. So if you're saying, oh, that was a good take or let's do that again, anything like that, it will skip over those kind of sentences if contextually it doesn't fit the rest of the story. So it goes above and beyond just the standard ums and ahs and silences.
None of these are difficult editing decisions. They're just tedious ones. This is the stuff that I wanted Power Cut to take care of even before I sat down to edit.
And as you can see here, I recorded the same thought over and over again. Power Cut actually looks for those best takes. So it's actually looking for the best sounding take as well.
And I'll show you all the takes that were done for that specific clip. And at any point you can go and review the takes that it chose. So it's not making the decisions for you.
It's giving you a suggestion. And then you can go and review and choose if that take is the best. The app actually learns your preferences as you use it more.
And if you do have a script, you can just add it here and it'll find all those edit choices even faster. For this video, I had an hour and 15 minutes of raw footage and it cut it down to 12 minutes. So I'm opening with something that's already beginning to look more like a video that I'm trying to make.
And this is the important thing right here is that this isn't the finished edit. I didn't want it to be. It's the first pass that I didn't want to spend an hour making myself.
At this point, I can just export to Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Premiere Pro. And this is probably the most important thing about building Power Cut. And I think a lot of AI editing tools have this backwards.
I want AI doing more of the boring work, not the creative work. Because maybe in the edit, the pause is there intentionally. And maybe it's part of the delivery.
and software can't really understand that but an editor can and nothing that power cut actually does is destructive and every automatic edit is shown as a strike and you can see why it made that decision but at any point you can go back in the transcript and just restore that because just like any other tool it may make some mistakes but it's a lot easier to catch those mistakes in the transcript form and if it picked the wrong take easily choose another take So you can see all the takes that correspond to the take that it chose, and you can go back and quickly find the one that works best for you.
And this is where PowerCut makes those boring decisions first, but you make the final decision. And once the transcript is done, I have my first pass ready to review. And that's how I think of PowerCut.
It's not replacing an editor. It's the assistant editor I wish I always had. Give it the raw footage, let it deal with the obvious cleanup, and then hand me a project ready to edit.
And a huge requirement for me was that Power Cut isn't trying to become the place where I finish my videos. Because when the story reads the way I want it, its job is basically done. That's where I can export to Final Cut Pro in a multicam.
If I wanted DaVinci Resolve also in multicam or in nested sequences in Premiere Pro, just click export and it saves an XML for those apps. And now I'm back to where I actually want to finish the video. These are real frame accurate edits referencing my original media in a multicam.
So if I had multiple camera angles or I had a screen share that I wanted to sync up, it's all there non -destructive. Or if I wanted to add a color grade. I'm able to do all of that right in this timeline.
Power cut hasn't rendered out a new baked in version of my video. My camera files haven't changed. It simply takes the decisions I made in the transcript and turn them into an editable timeline in the app that I want to use.
And now I can do the part that I actually enjoy. The pacing, B roll, music, graphics, sound design, color, all the fun stuff that I love doing in post -production. There's also a nice little side effect of doing the edit this way.
Power cut already knows exactly which words made it into the finished rough cut. And because power cut is essentially a text editor, if there is a misspelled word, I can just change it, correct it, and then replace it throughout the entire document. And even remember for future transcripts, click save.
and throughout the entire transcript it will replace that and correct it and for me as an editor this view makes sense because of all the extra metadata that comes with all the decisions that were made with the takes but if you prefer a more standard doc view or if you're a producer or director and you want to work with the entire transcript to show you everything that was recorded so you can actually do a paper edit very quickly and if you want to see just all the takes that were kept in and hide everything else.
You can hide the cuts and just see the entire video line by line with the time codes, which clip they're associated with, and just listen and watch as the transcript goes by. But if you prefer to edit in this view, you can just click edit document and you have all the same functionality that you have in the other view. So if you wanted to move whole sentences somewhere else, do that right here, too.
and the clip names and the time codes still remain intact. And the timeline is also active. So if you want, you can actually go in and make even more precise edits.
You can change the padding, you can change how long the silence is you want to get rid of. And anywhere that you click, the timeline also follows. So in this case, PowerCut can take the same transcript and turn it into a clean document.
Either the entire transcript, or strikethroughs, so everything that was edited out and kept. And in this view too, you can just search for anything that is within the document and then just quickly jump to that section.
So you can see in context everything that is in your document. And if you're working with a producer or client who doesn't want to go through the video files, you can export the full transcript, every take uncut, the cut with strikethroughs, So they can see everything in context, what was kept, what was deleted, and just the finished edit of all the selects.
And there's another situation where this becomes really powerful. What happens if the footage isn't even in English? PowerCAD currently transcribes into 13 languages locally on your Mac.
So if you have footage that isn't in English and one of the supported languages, you can translate the transcript into English so that you can understand what is actually being said and start working with it. And the entire edit still stays attached to the exact place those words were in the original spoken language. So you're only translating the document and not breaking the edit.
And if you're a Final Cut Pro editor or DaVinci editor, you can actually select text and choose favorites or add keywords or even markers. And you can use keyboard shortcuts like F to make a favorite and I'll underline it just like it does in Final Cut Pro. If you're going through your transcript and you find a good take that you want to mark and be able to find it in your edit later, you can just do that.
If you add keywords, it'll create smart keywords in Final Cut Pro. But markers work exactly the same way they do in Final Cut Pro. And this will create it in your main timeline and also in a...
in the multicam so you can actually create favorites and markers on text that isn't part of your main edit so you can go back to those at any point once you're in final cut pro so you can always find your favorites and your markers and even the keywords that you've put and at any point you can just turn those off or turn them back on and if you want and you have a whole bunch of these you can just export to a csv file the markers the favorites and the keywords and i'll show you the source time code the clip that it came from and where it is in the actual edit, if it's used or if it's actually struck.
And it'll show you a little line to go along with it. So it's a great way to get a jumpstart on organizing your footage in Final Cut Pro. And the markers also export to DaVinci Resolve.
Power Cut exists because I kept asking the same question over and over again. Why do I have to upload all my raw footage somewhere just to remove some silences and some ums? The edit analysis happens on your computer.
The footage stays on your computer. That was super important for me, especially with the kind of work that I do where I can't send stuff to some server out in the cloud. Because if I'm editing an unreleased product, client work, an interview that is heavily under NDA, or just have 100 gigabytes of 4K footage, I don't want to have to upload all that before I can start on a single edit.
Because the computer that's sitting on my desk is already incredibly powerful. So Power Cut was built to utilize it. Cutting out an um isn't difficult.
Finding a long pause isn't difficult. Choosing between three takes isn't difficult. I've been doing those things professionally for more than 20 years.
I just don't think that I have to spend my time still doing all of this. I don't want AI to make my video. I want AI to give me back that hour I used to waste before the real editing even started.
That's PowerCut. I want you to take your own footage through the entire workflow and export a real project into Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro. Because I want you to take one of those 30, 40, 50 minute talking head recordings and see how much work is left after the transcription and the first auto pass is done.
There's no subscription. You don't need an account. There's no time limit on how much you can transcribe per month.
It's a one time purchase and there's a completely free seven day free trial because if you're anything like me, this will save you a lot of time and it will be part of your workflow for every video moving forward. Give it a try. Let me know your feedback because that's how this app is going to get better.
As always, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
An editor of 20 years walks through the one part of the job he never stopped hating: the boring first pass of finding the ums, the false starts, and the best of five near-identical takes before any real editing can begin. So he built the tool himself.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:29concept
Auto Edit Pass
PowerCut's automatic first pass strikes silences, filler words, false starts, and off-topic production notes from a transcript, and flags a best take among repeated lines, all on-device.
Steal forany tool or workflow that separates a mechanical cleanup pass from the creative editing decisions that follow it
01:53concept
Paper editing
Treating the transcript as the primary editing surface: strike a sentence to cut it, drag a paragraph to move the footage with it, search a phrase to jump to every instance.
Steal forany long-form content workflow where reading beats scrubbing for finding structure
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
17:17link
“There's no subscription. You don't need an account. There's no time limit on how much you can transcribe per month. It's a one time purchase and there's a completely free seven day free trial.”
Delivered as the closing thesis restatement rather than a hard sales break, tied directly back to the on-device privacy argument made throughout the video.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
