First Cut Pro Just Made Post-Production Collaborative Video Editing Much Less Painful

Editing video is tedious enough on its own, but it becomes a whole new world of pain when producers, editors, audio guys, and others are trying to collaborate on a single project.

That’s where First Cut Pro (not to be confused with Final Cut Pro) comes in. The software comes out of Austin, where the company won our TC Meetup + Pitch-off Competition, meaning that the First Cut Pro guys will be ready to roll at TC Disrupt SF in September.

But what is First Cut Pro? Well, in short, it’s a collaborative dashboard that lets multiple people work and give feedback on a single project.

The most important feature is the ability to autopause video. As an editor is watching a rough cut of a project, each keystroke he makes (as commentary to the video) is recorded alongside a timestamp. While he’s typing, the video pauses, and once he presses enter, the video resumes.

Users can also create custom buttons to insert at whatever time they’d like, which are timestamped just like comments are. Comments are threaded, just like they are in most professional collaboration software like Convo and Yammer.

Once commentary has been added, users have control over who can access the project, sharing to others via email with a special pin.

Finally, First Cut Pro closes the loop, letting managers prioritize comment threads and then assign particular cuts or jobs to various editors.

When the project is exported, the same timestamped comments show up on each editor’s dashboard in their editing software of choice. Currently, the platform supports AVID, Adobe and Final Cut.

First Cut Pro is available now here. It has a tiered pricing structure, starting with a free account for personal use and going all the way up to $119/month for power users.