A Studio Social add-on

Edit your videos on an actual computer.

Reels, tutorials, behind-the-scenes, you talking to camera — Cut Studio writes the captions, strips the dead air, and makes the whole thing look like you meant it. In your browser, on your own machine, with nothing uploaded anywhere.

Because you have client galleries to deliver, not a phone screen to squint at.

Get it for $97 Watch me use it

One payment. Not a subscription. Mac or PC.

You have the footage. It's sitting there.

You filmed at the studio last month — behind the scenes, a setup walkthrough, you talking to camera. It's good. You know it's good. And it's still on the card, because posting it means editing on a phone — pinching a timeline the size of a business card while three client emails come in.

The tools built for this assume you're a full-time creator with an afternoon free. You are running a photography business in busy season.

What this replaces

Editing on your phone. Paying $19–39 a month forever. Uploading client footage to a service you've never heard of. Exporting to a second app just to get captions.

The walkthrough

One real video, start to finish.

Four steps. That's the whole thing.

1

Drop in your clip

Straight off your phone or your camera. It opens in the browser — no upload, no waiting, no account.

2

Let it find the dead air

It listens to your audio, marks every pause, and cuts them. Keep any you want to keep by clicking it. Trim the top and tail with a button, or drag across the waveform to cut something out of the middle.

3

Press "write my captions"

Speech recognition runs on your own laptop and writes the words with proper timing. Click any word to highlight it in your accent colour. Fix a typo everywhere at once.

4

Make it look like yours

Pick a typeface, set the softness, drop your logo on. Export an MP4 and post it.

Everything in it

Captions

  • Written for you — speech recognition runs on your machine, not a server
  • Word-level timing, so highlights land on the right syllable
  • Fix a word, a whole line, or every instance at once
  • Nudge the timing until it sits with your mouth, and step line by line to check it
  • Import an .srt, or paste a script you already wrote
  • Choose how many words appear at a time

How they look

  • Eleven typefaces — editorial, clean, handwritten, impact
  • Your colours for text and highlight, with glow or a solid block behind
  • Five motions: static, karaoke, pop, typewriter, word-by-word build
  • Drag captions anywhere on the frame
  • Instagram safe-area guide, so nothing hides under the buttons
  • Three presets to start from

Cutting

  • Automatic dead-air detection with your own thresholds
  • Trim the top and tail with one button each
  • Drag the waveform to cut a stretch out of the middle, or keep only that stretch
  • Click any cut to put it back
  • Undo, fifty steps deep, on ⌘Z
  • Rebuild the clip with the gaps genuinely gone

Making it yours

  • Diffusion filter — soft skin the way a Pro-Mist does it, not a phone filter
  • Glow, warmth, brightness, colour — with hold-to-compare
  • Your logo, placed and sized where you want it
  • Reframe yourself inside the vertical crop
  • Hook cards, zoom punches, music that ducks under your voice
  • Images full-frame or floating anywhere you drop them

Getting it out

  • 9:16, 4:5 and 1:1 — exports straight to MP4
  • Choose the size and quality that suits the post
  • Save your work and pick it up again later without re-transcribing
  • What you see in the preview is exactly what exports

What the others cost you

Same job. Every month, forever, and your client footage goes to their servers.

ToolPer yearYour footage
Submagic$228–468Uploaded
OpusClip$180–348Uploaded
Descript$192–288Uploaded
Cut Studio$97 onceNever leaves your machine

Competitor pricing as published in 2026. Cut Studio has no per-minute cost because the work happens on your own computer — which is also why one payment covers it.

Worth saying plainly

Your client footage never leaves your computer.

Not the video, not the audio, not the transcript. There's no upload step because there's no server. Everything — the pause detection, the speech recognition, the export — runs inside your browser on your own machine.

For newborn and maternity work, where you're filming in people's homes and around their children, that isn't a technical footnote. It's the reason a lot of photographers won't touch the alternatives.

Founding price

Launch — lifetime access
$97 $197

One payment. Every update included, for as long as it exists. No renewal, no per-minute charges, no cap on how many videos you make.

Get Cut Studio

Founding pricing is for the launch window. After that, new buyers move to annual billing — everyone who buys now keeps lifetime access at this price.

Less than five months of Submagic, and then never again.

What's coming

Included — you bought the tool, not a version of it.

Next

You, cut out on top. Film a second clip of yourself reacting or introducing, and sit over the main video with the background erased — no green screen. In testing now.

Next

Caption templates. Save a look — typeface, colours, motion, position — and apply it to every clip after that in one click.

Next

Your brand kit. Fonts, colours and logo stored once and shared with the rest of Studio Social.

Soon

Camera footage, handled. Drop in ProRes or anything else off a real camera and have it converted for you, instead of exporting first.

Soon

Several clips, one video. Stitch takes together, with trim handles on the timeline.

Soon

Speed, fades and transitions — including the slow-down-for-emphasis move.

Later

Batch captioning. Point it at a folder of clips and come back to all of them captioned.

Later

More hook layouts, built from the styles actually working on Reels rather than invented.

Questions

Which browsers does it work in?
Chrome and Edge are best — they export straight to MP4. Safari works too. Firefox runs the editor but exports WebM rather than MP4. You need a reasonably current browser; anything from the last couple of years is fine.
Do I need to install anything?
No. It's a web page. Open it and work. The only thing it downloads is the speech model the first time you use automatic captions — after that it's kept on your machine and every clip starts immediately.
Is there a file size limit?
For the instant pause scan, keep files under about 350 MB. Above that, use the listen-through scan instead, which handles any size. There's no limit on how long your video can be, though anything over about fifteen minutes is better trimmed down first.
What file formats work?
MP4 with H.264 is the safe answer and what most phones produce. iPhone video works directly. Footage off a cinema camera — ProRes and similar — needs converting to MP4 first; there are one-click instructions inside, and automatic conversion is on the way.
Does my video get uploaded anywhere?
No. There is no server to upload to. Your video is read off your own drive, processed in your browser, and saved back to your downloads. Nothing is transmitted, stored or seen by anyone — including me.
Mac or PC?
Both. It's a browser tool, so whatever runs Chrome runs this. It works on an iPad too, though the whole point is getting off a small screen.
How long does it take?
Pause detection is instant on most files. Captions take roughly a third of your clip's length. Export runs in real time — a sixty-second video takes about a minute.
How accurate are the captions?
Very, for clear speech in a quiet room. It will mangle proper nouns and photography jargon the way every tool does — which is why fixing a word everywhere at once is built in rather than an afterthought.
Do I need the Studio Social System to use it?
No. It stands alone. It's built to sit alongside Studio Social and will share your brand kit once that lands, but you can buy and use it on its own.
What does lifetime actually mean?
You pay once and keep access to the tool and every update to it. Because the work happens on your computer rather than mine, there's no ongoing cost per user — which is what makes that a promise I can keep rather than a marketing line.

The footage is already shot.

That's the part that took work. Getting them posted shouldn't take an evening on a phone.

Get Cut Studio — $97

Built by Ana Brandt. 27 years behind a camera, and too many of them spent fighting the software.