SIFTfcp · footage selects for Final Cut Pro
SIFTfcp watches every frame of a shoot on your Mac, leaves out what is shaky, soft, dark or blown out, and hands Final Cut the stretches worth keeping. It gets you about 85% of the way there. The rest is your custom job, and it learns from it.
SIFTfcp does the first pass on its own: every usable stretch of every clip, sorted and ready in Final Cut. What is left is the selects only you would make, set by hand in a few minutes with in and out points. Those custom selects are what it learns from, so it gets closer to how you pick with every shoot.
Not the same number as the 79% above. 79% is the footage: how much of the shoot was usable. 85% is the edit: how far the automatic selects get you toward the ones you would make yourself.
Usable footage pulled
0 h 00 min
out of 2 h 5 min of footage in all, across 136 clips
Selects
271
pieces for Final Cut
Talking
39 s
in 4 pieces
Left out
26 min
shaky, soft, dark and the rest
Nothing kept
14
of 136 clips
Move across a picture to skim it; click to play.Size
Talking project · 0:39 in 4 pieces
Interviews project · transcribed on this Mac
Measurements saved with the analysis.
Every clip re-planned in about a second. Footage read again: none.
What goes in
You have set 16 clips by hand in Ava + Theo. Train SIFTfcp on them?
It looks at what you kept and what you took out in every clip you set by hand, here and in your other videos, and from then on picks new videos' selects more the way you would. The selects you have here stay as they are.New videos will start from what it learned, so their selects come out closer to the ones you make by hand. The more clips you set yourself, the closer it gets.
M0114:00:00;00
Add the camera folders, or point SIFTfcp at a Final Cut library. A library is only ever read: SIFTfcp copies its database aside and works from the copy. When more footage turns up on Monday, Analyse New reads only what is new.
M02
Each clip is decoded once, on your Mac's own hardware decoder, and every frame is measured: camera movement to a fraction of a pixel, zoom, focus, exposure, and whether the camera is pointing at the ground. A smooth pan passes. Jitter does not. Here a five-minute clip by the water is read as it was shot.
M03
Ava + Theo: 136 clips, 2 h 5 min of footage. SIFTfcp kept 1 h 39 min of it, 79%, and every stretch it dropped carries its reason: shaky, the ground, a quick zoom, an exposure change, soft, blown out. Nothing goes without a word on why.
M04
This is a morning in a carving shed, each clip a filmstrip you can skim. Portrait clips stand upright, as tall as two landscape rows, and go to Final Cut as a project in their own shape. Nothing is pillarboxed.
M05
Speeches, toasts, talks and presentations go to a Talking project, taken whole so nobody is cut off mid-sentence. Interviews are transcribed on the Mac, cut into parts at each question, and every part is titled by what it is about, such as Ava 02 How they met.
M06
In Review/Tune every select is a yellow box on the filmstrip. Drag an end to trim, drag the middle to slide. Skim with S, scroll a frame at a time, and set in and out points even with the mouse held. 9 and 0 step between clips. Back to Automatic undoes it all.
M07
Every rule is a slider, grouped by your footage, movement and picture: shake limit, fastest pan, quick zoom, focus, too dark, blown out. The measurements are saved, so moving one re-plans every clip in about a second, without reading the footage again.
M08
Second cameras, a Zoom recorder, lavaliers. SIFTfcp lines them up by the shape of their sound, and Final Cut receives a multicam clip with the best sound chosen for each speech.
M09
Write Final Cut XML and Final Cut receives three projects: Selects, Talking and Interviews. Stabilisation is on, the keywords show in the browser, and the media is referenced where it sits. More footage later? Only what is new goes in.
M10
The automatic pass gets you about 85% of the way. The rest is your custom job, and that is what SIFTfcp learns from. Reach the last clip and it offers to train on the clips you set by hand. New shoots start from what it learned, with nothing to apply.
Point SIFTfcp at a shoot and it keeps every usable stretch of every clip, with a reason written down for everything it left out. That gets you about 85% of the way there.
Drag a select's ends to trim it, or its middle to slide it. Move a rule's slider and every clip re-plans in about a second, without reading the footage again.
Skim any clip and set its in and out points, even with the mouse still held. A shot the rules dropped becomes a select.
The clips you set by hand are what SIFTfcp learns from: what you kept counts as worth having, what you took out as not. Train it on them and every new shoot starts from what it learned, with nothing to apply. The more clips you set yourself, the closer it gets.
Every feature. Cancel any time: what you have already analysed and exported stays yours.
SubscribeAbout $7 a month. Every feature, the same app, $35 less than twelve months.
SubscribeFree for your first 100 clips: every feature, the export to Final Cut too. No time limit, no payment details.A licence key arrives by email when you subscribe. Nothing to sign in to.
Try it freeYes. Analysis, browsing, Review/Tune, hand picks, multicam and the export to Final Cut all run with no connection, and there is nothing to sign in to. Once you subscribe, SIFTfcp checks its licence now and then, when the paid-through date is within ten days. That check sends the key, the version of SIFTfcp and a number standing for your Mac, and nothing about your footage. The one other exception: the first time it transcribes an interview, macOS may download Apple's speech model for your language, once.
No. Nothing leaves the Mac: no cloud, no account, no analytics. Your clients' footage stays on your drives. If you ever send us a problem report, it is a text file you choose to send, with folder and library names taken out and no footage, pictures or names in it.
What gets cut is measured, not guessed: camera movement to a fraction of a pixel, zoom and roll, focus from the sharpest edges, exposure from brightness and clipping. Those are measurements with limits you can see and move, not a model's opinion of your shots.
For what measuring cannot do, SIFTfcp uses Apple's own on-device frameworks, built into macOS: Sound Analysis to hear when someone is speaking, Apple's speech recogniser to transcribe interviews, and Vision to recognise what is in a frame, such as people, grass or sky. If Apple Intelligence is switched on, it names each part of an interview by its topic. No cloud AI: nothing is generated, nothing is trained on your footage, and none of it leaves the Mac.
Never. Source files are only read. A library is never opened: its database is copied aside and SIFTfcp reads the copy. The names SIFTfcp gives clips live only in the XML.
No, and it is not trying to. It does the first pass, the selects: every usable stretch of every clip, with the talking and the interviews in projects of their own. That gets you about 85% of the way there. The rest is a custom job, the selects only you would make, and SIFTfcp learns from those custom selects, so it gets closer to how you pick with every shoot. The film is still yours to cut.
Nothing is thrown away. The selects point at your original files, and Review/Tune shows every stretch that was left out and why. A shot the rules dropped goes back in when you set its in and out points. The clips you set by hand are also what SIFTfcp learns from: training tries the judgement calls across every shoot you have set by hand, and every new shoot after that starts from what it learned, with nothing to apply. The shoot you were reviewing keeps its selects as they are.
Final Cut Pro on the Mac, and only Final Cut Pro (FCPXML 1.11). Not Final Cut Pro for iPad, which does not import XML, and not Premiere or Resolve. Final Cut is not needed to analyse or review, only to open the export.
macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. Interview transcription needs macOS 26. Topic titles for interview parts use Apple Intelligence where the Mac has it, and fall back to the names and nouns said most where it does not. On Intel, analysis, review, multicam and the export all run; topic titles do not, because Apple Intelligence needs Apple silicon.
Anything macOS can play: H.264, HEVC and ProRes from cameras, drones and phones, from camera folders or a Final Cut library.
Reading the footage is the slow part, and it goes as fast as the drive allows: from a USB hard drive, 4K reads at about the speed it plays. Proxies on the Mac's own drive go much quicker, and the export can still point at the camera originals. Before it starts, SIFTfcp gives a rough time, going by the length of the footage and how fast the last analysis from that drive went, and it counts down as it runs. It runs in the background at low priority, and stopping and starting again loses nothing. Once the footage is measured, changing any setting re-plans every clip in about a second.
Browsing and choosing, yes: the pictures of every clip are kept with the analysis. Playing needs the drive.
$10 a month, or $85 a year, which saves $35 against paying monthly. Prices are in Canadian dollars. Cancel any time: what you have already analysed and exported stays yours.
Yes. The first 100 clips of your own footage are free, with every feature, the export to Final Cut included. No time limit and no payment details. It counts clips rather than hours because reading a full day of footage from a USB drive takes about as long as the footage runs, and a 24-hour trial could go on one analysis before you had seen a single result.
SIFTfcp is a project of the Folklore Creative Company. We have been making films for over 20 years, and for most of them we wished a tool like this existed. In the end we built it ourselves.
Our own team uses it on every shoot now, events and documentaries alike, and it has done what we hoped: our edits start from its selects instead of from the raw footage, and the clips we set by hand keep making the next shoot's selects closer to ours.
Point it at the footage, go and do something else, and come back to a Selects project in Final Cut about 85% of the way there, with a reason written down for every stretch it left out. The rest is yours, and it learns from it.