FirstCut

FirstCut is a browser-based narrative editor that lets you edit the story before you edit the video. Instead of starting with a timeline and searching through hours of footage, FirstCut helps you discover and shape the story first. It represents a narrative as a sequence of beats, then connects each beat to the real footage that can tell it. Explore different stories within the same footage. Reshape beats, swap clips, change words, and instantly play each version. Because the story structure is separate from the underlying footage, you can experiment with the narrative without rebuilding the edit from scratch. Once the story works, FirstCut turns that structure into a rough cut that can be exported as an EDL and taken into a professional editor for the final edit. The key idea is simple: First understand the story. Then edit the video. FirstCut is designed for interviews, documentaries, podcasts, testimonials, and other footage where the challenge isn't simply cutting clips together—it's figuring out what the footage is actually trying to say. Your video files are processed locally in the browser and never uploaded to a server.