Meet Ruff Cut:
automated AI video editor for Interviews in Premiere Pro

Every editor who works with interviews knows the math. A one-hour conversation yields maybe four minutes of usable content — and finding those four minutes means scrubbing through all sixty, taking notes, marking in and out points, and slowly assembling a rough cut before any real editing begins. It's the least creative part of the job, and it eats the most time.

Ruff Cut is a Premiere Pro plugin that does that part for you.

What it does

You open your synced multicam sequence, write a short brief describing the story you want — something like "Focus on how the guest's career pivot was driven by a single moment of doubt. Keep the candid moments, drop the small talk and the industry deep cuts." — set a target duration, and click Generate.

A few minutes later, there's a new sequence in your project containing just the moments that serve your story, trimmed on natural sentence boundaries, ordered to build momentum from hook to payoff. Your original timeline is never touched. Don't like the result? Delete the sequence, tighten the brief, and regenerate — the second pass takes under a minute.

How it works

Ruff Cut chains together three steps that used to require three different tools:

1. Transcription. The plugin extracts a small audio file from your multicam source locally (using ffmpeg), uploads it, and runs it through Whisper for word-level transcription with speaker labels. This is the slowest step — a few minutes for a long interview — and it happens exactly once per source. The transcript is cached on your machine, so every subsequent edit of the same footage skips straight to the next step.

2. Editorial planning. The transcript, your brief, and your target duration go to a large language model — you pick which one from a dropdown: Claude, GPT, or Gemini. The model reads the entire conversation and selects the segments that best serve your narrative, cutting filler, false starts, repetition, and tangents. It returns precise timestamps for every cut.

3. Assembly. The plugin builds a new Premiere sequence matching your source settings and places each selected segment in order. What lands on your timeline is a clean rough cut, ready for review.

Camera switching stays in your hands. Ruff Cut deliberately doesn't pick angles for you — select the clips, enable multicam, and flip cameras in Premiere's multicam monitor the way you always have. The plugin's job is to answer "which sixty seconds out of sixty minutes matter?" — the creative decisions stay yours.

Why the iteration loop matters

The real power isn't the first generation — it's the second, third, and fourth. Because transcripts are cached, changing your brief costs almost nothing. Want a 90-second social cut and a 5-minute YouTube version from the same interview? Two briefs, two generates, two minutes. Want to see what the edit looks like focused on a different theme entirely? Rewrite the brief and go again.

This turns rough-cutting from a linear slog into something closer to a conversation: describe what you want, look at what comes back, refine, repeat.

The practical details

Ruff Cut runs as a standard Adobe CEP panel on macOS. Transcription and LLM routing go through fal.ai, so a single API key covers everything — there's no separate OpenAI or Anthropic account to manage, and a typical edit costs cents. Only the compressed audio leaves your machine; your video files never get uploaded anywhere.

Setup takes about five minutes: install the panel, install ffmpeg via Homebrew, paste in a fal.ai API key. From there, every interview you edit starts with a rough cut instead of a blank timeline.

Ruff Cut v1.0 — built for editors who'd rather spend their time on the cut that matters.