Coming soon · macOS
Paper Cut is the story stage before the edit. It works beside you as you build — quietly surfacing the next piece that fits, honest about what’s there and what isn’t. You open your NLE with the arc already in place, and spend the edit refining instead of searching for it.
Coming to macOS first, then Windows — we’ll email you when it ships.
The shape before the cut
The problem
You can’t hold a hundred hours in your head — so Paper Cut does. It surfaces what’s in the footage and organizes it by theme, scene, collection, and through-line, so you start with a leg up instead of a blank timeline.
The principle
Paper Cut works beside you, not instead of you. As you build, it reads what you’re making and offers the next piece — quietly, and only when it’s a real fit. It proposes; you decide. Every call stays yours.
What it does
Working together
As you build, Paper Cut offers what might come next — a scene to open with, a clip for the moment you’re on. Quiet suggestions, never auto-everything. Promote what lands, wave off the rest — and it learns your taste with every call.
✦ Here’s what I’m seeing — Day 6
Intimate moments, reflective drives, and the practical rhythm of RV life — strong emotional beats, a mix of verité and context.
Establishes the dynamic between Brian and his subjects — the human connection, the Americana setting.
A more intimate, artistic portrait — widens the range of subjects in the project.
The landing
Every clip clustered by what it’s actually about — theme, region, shoot day, visual quality. Your strongest material rises to the top. Filter, and the whole board recomputes on the spot.
Top picks — your strongest material
By theme
By region
By visual quality
The memory
Every clip watched, rated, and transcribed down to its moments — that’s the memory Paper Cut draws on. Layered like your own, it connects a feeling to the exact place it lives, which is how it knows what to suggest next. The more you build, the more it connects.
Highlights
00:00 Opening close-up — masked Elvis, full glitter. The image is the thesis.
00:21 “So that’s why the king’s wearing the mask.”
Transcript
brian You live in Vegas?
subject Twenty years. First time I’ve put the suit on in a month.
The hand-off
Cut at the story level — arrange scenes on the node canvas, even edit by transcript inside a node — without the ticky-tacky frame-trimming of an NLE. It’s an approximation, not the final cut. When the shape holds, send it to Premiere, Avid, or Resolve and spend that time refining, not rebuilding the arc.
If the footage isn’t there, Paper Cut says so. It never pads results or oversells a clip to look busy.
Bookmark a scene, branch it, revert in two clicks. Every version lives side by side — nothing’s ever lost.
Run the models on your own machine, or switch on managed cloud AI with Sync. Either way, your footage stays on your drive.
Your team
A film is a conversation between everyone with a stake in it — editor, director, producer. Paper Cut keeps that conversation in one place, wherever each of you is working.
Sync moves the AI off your machine, not your project. The describing and the reasoning run on managed servers instead of your Mac — the bigger models, nothing to download — while the project stays on the machine that holds the footage.
Invite a director or producer in as a collaborator. They shape a scene, hand it back, leave a note on a clip — the story moves between you, instead of living in one person’s head.
When a cut is ready, hand it over. The Premiere panel builds it as a new sequence in your open project; for Avid, Paper Cut writes an AAF, or a native bin straight into your project folder. One hand-off, and anything that will need a relink is named before you export rather than after.
Questions
It is — just not an NLE. You edit in Paper Cut, but on a node canvas instead of a timeline: expand a node and it opens an edit-by-transcript view, where you highlight the passages you want and it sequences them for you. It handles the story-level cut and skips the ticky-tacky frame-trimming. When the shape holds, hand it to Premiere, Avid, or Resolve for the fine cut.
No — your media never leaves your drive. Paper Cut reads it where it sits. What goes out is only what’s needed to describe a clip: a handful of frames and that clip’s transcript, sent on your own Anthropic key. That applies to search and anything you ask later, not just the first scan. Transcription runs on your machine — the Whisper build ships inside the app, and if it can’t run, the clip is described without a transcript rather than sent anywhere else. On the Sync tiers those same calls go through managed AI instead of straight from your machine, which is how the allowance is counted. Sync isn’t out yet.
Paper Cut will run on simple monthly plans — from $12/mo Standalone, which runs the on-device models, up to the Sync tiers with managed cloud AI. See Pricing for what’s planned.
Paper Cut has a Premiere panel that builds your stringout as a new sequence in the open project. You install it into Premiere yourself, and it’s new — treat it as early. There’s no Avid panel yet. For Avid it writes an AAF, or a native .avb bin straight into your project’s bin folder; for Premiere and Resolve it writes an FCP7 XML that relinks to your source files by path. Final Cut needs FCPXML, which isn’t written yet. The catalogue itself is editor-agnostic — you can use Paper Cut purely as a logging tool even if you cut elsewhere.
Paper Cut scans MOV, MXF, MP4, MKV, M4V and AVI, plus WAV and MP3 audio and stills — so ProRes, H.264, H.265 and DNxHR come in as they are. Camera raw (BRAW, R3D, ARRIRAW) needs the vendor’s own SDK, which isn’t bundled: transcode to ProRes or H.264 first and point Paper Cut at that. Mixed frame rates aren’t conformed yet — in an Avid sequence an off-rate clip comes through as a gap, named, so the rest of the cut still loads. Source timecode is read off the media at export, so the sequence lands with your real TC, drop-frame and all, and relinks by filename or by the clip’s source UMID.
Paper Cut is the first software product from Supergiant — a documentary post-production specialist and software label. Built by a working editor, for anyone who has to find the story in a mountain of footage.
macOS first. Windows is on the table once 1.0 ships. Linux later, maybe.
Plans
Standalone
$12/mo
Everything runs on your machine.
Sync Solo
$20/mo
Managed cloud AI. Your project stays on your machine.
Sync Teams
$50/mo
Bring the whole room into the project.
Enterprise
Let’s talk
For large teams and companies.
Need more hands? Get in touch about extra collaborator seats — $8/mo each.
Paper Cut · coming soon to macOS, Windows to follow