All AI Guides & Explainers | Cutroom AI
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Every explainer on the site, grouped by topic. Written to stay useful as products change: we explain how to judge a tool rather than ranking this month's leader.

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AI in the Edit

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Where AI Actually Fits in a Real Editing Timeline (and Where It Slows You Down)

A working editor's map of the timeline stages where AI earns its keep and the ones where it quietly costs you hours.

Tomas Reyes, a documentary editor turned post-production trainer · 8 min read

What Generative Fill Actually Does to Moving Footage Versus a Still Frame

Why the fill that vanishes cleanly on a photo turns into a crawling, flickering mess across a moving clip, and how to work with the difference.

Tomas Reyes, a documentary editor turned post-production trainer · 8 min read

Keeping Your Source Files Private When an AI Tool Processes Them in the Cloud

Embargoed footage, NDAs, and unreleased cuts don't mix well with upload-first AI tools — here's how to use them without leaking your material.

Tomas Reyes, a documentary editor turned post-production trainer · 9 min read

Your AI Assistant

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From Two-Hour Interview to Paper Edit: Running a Transcript Through a Chat Assistant

A practical workflow for turning a long unscripted interview into a story-ordered paper edit with a chat assistant, without losing timecode accuracy.

Hana Okafor, a post-production supervisor for unscripted TV · 9 min read

Building a Shot List and B-Roll Prompt You Can Reuse on Every Project

How to turn a script or treatment into a consistent shot list and B-roll plan with a saved, tunable chat prompt instead of starting from a blank page each time.

Hana Okafor, a post-production supervisor for unscripted TV · 8 min read

Logging and Tagging Raw Footage With an Assistant Instead of by Hand

A realistic look at using chat and multimodal assistants to log, tag, and make raw footage searchable, and where a human logger still has to sit in the chair.

Hana Okafor, a post-production supervisor for unscripted TV · 9 min read

Scripts & Captions

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Fixing Auto-Generated Captions So They Read Like Real Sentences

Auto-captions get the words mostly right and the reading experience mostly wrong — here's how to clean them fast without re-timing everything.

Devin Marsh, a scriptwriter and voiceover director · 8 min read

Translating Subtitles Without Wrecking Your Timing or On-Screen Context

Machine translation of subtitles fails in ways that only show up on screen — text overflow, broken references, and lines that no longer fit the cut.

Devin Marsh, a scriptwriter and voiceover director · 9 min read

Drafting Voiceover Copy That Matches How the Creator Actually Talks

AI writes clean prose and creators speak in messier, better rhythms — closing that gap is what makes a voiceover sound like a person, not a script.

Devin Marsh, a scriptwriter and voiceover director · 9 min read

Visuals & Motion

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Generating B-roll That Actually Cuts Together With Your Real Footage

Most AI B-roll looks fine in isolation and falls apart the second it sits next to your camera. Here's how to close the gap.

Yuki Tanaka, a motion designer and colorist · 9 min read

Using AI Color-Matching Between Cameras Without Flattening the Look

AI shot-matching can align two cameras in seconds, or quietly sand the character off both. The difference is how you use it.

Yuki Tanaka, a motion designer and colorist · 8 min read

Testing Thumbnail Variations Before You Commit an Afternoon to Design

AI lets you rough out a dozen thumbnail directions in twenty minutes, so you design the winning one instead of guessing.

Yuki Tanaka, a motion designer and colorist · 7 min read

AI Avatar and UGC Ad Generators in 2026: A Working Editor's Buyer's Guide

Which AI avatar and UGC video tools actually earn a place in a paid workflow — tested by an editor, sorted by the job you need done.

Yuki Tanaka, a motion designer and colorist · 9 min read

Automation & Pipelines

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Batch-Transcoding and Renaming a Whole Shoot With a Few Lines of FFmpeg

Turn a memory card full of cryptic camera clips into editor-ready proxies with consistent names, using shell loops and FFmpeg.

Sam Delacroix, an editing-pipeline engineer · 8 min read

Auto-Generating a Rough Cut From Transcript Timestamps

Use word-level transcription and a short script to assemble a first assembly edit that opens straight in Resolve or Premiere.

Sam Delacroix, an editing-pipeline engineer · 9 min read

Scripting Silence Removal for Talking-Head Footage

Detect and cut dead air automatically with FFmpeg or auto-editor, then keep the control you need over pacing and breaths.

Sam Delacroix, an editing-pipeline engineer · 8 min read

Getting Paid

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Pricing an Edit When AI Has Cut Your Turnaround in Half

If your machine cut, transcript-based rough assembly, and auto-captions now save you a day per project, hourly billing quietly punishes you for it.

Camille Boothe, a freelance editor and boutique studio owner · 8 min read

Telling Clients Which Parts of Their Video Used AI, and Why

A short, honest AI-use note on your deliverables protects the client, protects you, and is quietly becoming a thing serious editors are expected to provide.

Camille Boothe, a freelance editor and boutique studio owner · 8 min read

Deciding Which Subscription Tools Are Worth Keeping Each Quarter

AI editing subscriptions creep up on you five and fifteen dollars at a time; a 30-minute quarterly review turns that drift back into deliberate spending.

Camille Boothe, a freelance editor and boutique studio owner · 7 min read