What changed in RoughCut

Version 1.10.2

• Fixes an issue where Apple's payment sheet for RoughCut Pro or the RoughCut unlock could open without the button that confirms the purchase.

Version 1.10.1

• Fixes an audio-analysis timing issue that could shift cut boundaries in some long recordings. Start a new job to apply the correction.

Version 1.10

• Claude by Anthropic is now available as a third AI provider, using your own Claude API key. Set LLM provider to anthropic in Settings; OpenAI stays the default for new installations, and existing provider choices are preserved. See Create and add a Claude API key.
• Choose a reasoning level for supported OpenAI and Claude models in Settings → Choose Model & Estimate…. Default keeps the tested setting; higher levels are slower and cost more, and they do not always cut better. Gemini has no level control in RoughCut. See Choose a reasoning level.
• A job whose saved reasoning level the selected model does not offer stops before any provider call, with a message that lists the supported levels. See Error message reference.
• Help explains reasoning levels and how they affect waiting time and provider cost, and Help → API Costs links current Claude rates.

Version 1.9.2

• Starting a rough cut or a transcription opens that job's progress screen immediately, and Process stops accepting further clicks once the job has been accepted. See Understand job progress.
• Cancel Job now stops the work itself, including a local transcription already running and a job started in another window. The button reads Cancelling… while it does, a cancelled job's stage reads Cancelled, and its header reads Job cancelled rather than Job failed. Cancelling still leaves partial files in the job folder; separately, Delete Job Artifacts on a running job now waits for its worker to stop before removing anything.
• The evaluation tools are development-only and are no longer part of the App Store build: there is no Evaluation item in the sidebar, no Golden set (evaluation data) picker in Settings → Models & Data, and no Evals group in Settings → Full. See Evaluate RoughCut against your own edits.
• Restore Purchases reports a failure to reach the App Store as Could not restore purchases: <reason> instead of looking like a restore that found nothing, and Not Now on the purchase screens is easier to see; the Esc key closes them too. See Trial, unlock, and Pro.

Version 1.9.1

• The first welcome page now includes a four-minute captioned guide, bundled for offline playback with native controls. The video matches the app's English or Arabic interface and starts only when you choose to play it.
• The seven written tour pages remain available. Use Continue to read them, Skip tour to leave, and Help → RoughCut Welcome Tour to reopen the guide. Watch on YouTube is an optional external browser link. See Get started in ten minutes.

Version 1.9

Audio-only rough cuts, both timelines in one export, and a clearer AI stage.

Added

• Rough cuts from audio alone: drop a WAV, MP3 or M4A on New Rough Cut, or choose Browse Audio…, and RoughCut builds an audio timeline for Final Cut Pro with the same cutting controls and the optional review timeline. With a video and an audio file together, the audio is used for analysis and the timeline references the video. See Choose video and audio inputs.
• Export Both Timelines…: on a job with the Pro annotated review timeline, one folder choice saves <stem> - Cleaned Cut.fcpxml and <stem> - Annotated Review.fcpxml together in a new <stem> - RoughCut folder. Existing exports are kept. See Export and import FCPXML.
• Choose Model & Estimate… next to the model fields in Settings: pick an OpenAI or Gemini model your key can reach and estimate a job's cost with adjustable duration, token assumptions and prices. GPT-6 Astra is an optional model. Help → API Costs adds a dated example and links to current rates. See Choose OpenAI or Gemini.
• Occasional native App Store rating requests after repeated use, plus Help → Rate RoughCut in the App Store…. RoughCut never learns whether you rated it or what you wrote.
• A four-minute getting-started video, in English and in Arabic, embedded in Get started in ten minutes and on the home page.

Changed

• OpenAI is the default provider for new installations, with GPT-5.6 Sol at medium reasoning as the default model. Existing provider and model choices are preserved on update, and Gemini remains available in Settings. The welcome tour's key page now walks through the OpenAI setup first. See Create and add an OpenAI API key.
• The AI stage shows AI is reviewing your transcript with an animated indicator and the real elapsed time instead of a frozen percentage, because the provider reports none. See Understand job progress.
• Single-file exports are named <stem> - Cleaned Cut.fcpxml and <stem> - Annotated Review.fcpxml (spaced hyphen) instead of <stem> — RoughCut.fcpxml. The XML Pack and Debug Bundle names are unchanged.

Version 1.8

Smarter cuts, and a colour-coded review timeline for Final Cut Pro.

Added

• Also export an annotated review timeline, a Pro option on New Rough Cut. Nothing is cut in it: every removal stays on the timeline as a colour-coded clip — Retake, False start, Tangent, Filler, Noise, Suggestion, and Silence if you ask for it — with the reason in its notes and a to-do marker. Import it into Final Cut Pro, search a role in the Timeline Index, press ⌘A then Delete, and a whole category ripples out at once. Silences you chose not to include are cut out exactly as in the cleaned cut, so only speech decisions are left to review. See Review every cut in Final Cut Pro.
• Video type (Auto, Explainer / talking head, Screen demo) and Edit intensity (Light, Standard, Heavy) pickers under Fine-tune. See Create your first rough cut.
• New Rough Cut remembers your last-used settings, and Reset restores the defaults. The media and the video goal are never remembered.
• A new welcome-tour page, Review the cuts in Final Cut Pro, showing the two timelines a job can produce.

Changed

• The editor keeps borderline tangent cuts as review suggestions instead of cutting them, on English jobs. Fewer good sentences are lost, and the review list says what it was unsure about. See Review the cut on the timeline.
• Loop and hallucination clean-up is more precise: unreliable spans over silence are removed automatically, and spoken ones are kept for review.
• Auto-detect language now votes across the longest speech regions of the recording, so a bilingual opener no longer locks the whole video to the wrong language. See Switch between English and Arabic.
• Transcribe Only shows the transcript as timestamped cues you can play back — exactly what the SRT contains — and drops whisper's well-known hallucination phrases (subtitle credits, canned outros over music), listing every removed phrase. Rough cuts are unchanged. See Read and verify a transcript result.
• Second Look may now auto-apply up to 20 spans and 15% of the surviving words per pass, up from 10 and 10%. Its confidence floor is unchanged. See Use Second Look safely.
• New advanced keys under Pipeline v2, all at their tested defaults. See the advanced settings reference.

Trial and Pro

• Your five included cuts now include every RoughCut Pro feature — Smart Silence, Cloud transcription, Second Look, and the annotated review timeline — so you can try them before deciding. After the five, the one-time unlock keeps you cutting and Pro stays an optional subscription. See Trial, core unlock, and RoughCut Pro.

Versions 1.1 to 1.7

Smaller releases between 1.0 and 1.8, each already reflected in the articles it touched.

• 1.1 — Cloud transcription through OpenAI as a Pro, per-job choice using your own key, and a clearer Fine-tune disclosure on the New Rough Cut screen.
• 1.2 — Second Look, the optional Pro refine pass.
• 1.3 — The Arabic interface, a fix to language auto-detection, and a RoughCut Welcome Tour button in Help.
• 1.4 — The Terms of Use, available from inside the app.
• 1.5 — Goal summarising for over-length video goals (Pro), plus screenshot and copy corrections.
• 1.6 — Clearer wording about AI keys and provider billing.
• 1.7 — A fix for stalled model-download progress, and a Help answer on installing the model manually.

Version 1.0

The first public release, on the Mac App Store.

Added

• Silence and pause removal running entirely on your Mac, with Quiet room, Standard, Noisy, and Custom dB recording environments.
• On-device transcription with a locally cached Whisper model, using Metal acceleration.
• An optional AI editing pass, on Gemini or OpenAI under your own key, proposing removals for retakes, false starts, tangents, filler, and noise.
• A full review list with per-cut transcript, category, confidence, and range playback, plus Recompute Cuts to apply your changes without re-transcribing or calling the AI again.
• Frame-accurate FCPXML export that references your original media in place, plus an XML pack and a debug bundle.
• Transcribe Only, free and unlimited, exporting SRT and plain text.
• A Final Cut Pro share destination path, including an audio-only route for transcribing finished edits.
• English and Arabic interfaces, with Arabic as an explicit opt-in rather than a system-locale default.
• Five included rough cuts, a one-time core unlock, and an optional RoughCut Pro subscription.

Privacy

• On-device transcription is the default and uploads nothing.
• The AI editing pass sends transcript text only, under your own key.
• Pro Cloud transcription is opt-in per job and is the only feature that sends audio.
• Langfuse tracing ships off and is inert without your own keys.

Compatibility

• Apple Silicon Macs only.
• Video: mp4, mov, mkv, avi, m4v. Audio: wav, mp3, m4a.
• FCPXML 1.8, designed for Final Cut Pro and importable by DaVinci Resolve. Premiere Pro requires XML conversion first.

Which version you have

RoughCut ships updates through the Mac App Store. The App Store listing is authoritative for the version available to you — check it there rather than inferring a version from this page, and use RoughCut → About to see what you have installed.

When a release changes behaviour that this documentation describes, the affected articles are updated and re-verified before the change is published here. A release is added to this page once it is confirmed as publicly available.

This page deliberately never lists unreleased work, internal build numbers, or development milestones. Only changes that have actually reached users belong here.

How this documentation stays accurate

Documentation drifting away from the app it describes is the failure mode that matters most for a reference like this, so it is treated as a build problem rather than a good intention.

• Every article records the app version it was verified against. The date appears in the metadata row at the top of each page.
• Sources are mapped to articles. Each article records which parts of the app it depends on, so a change in one is traceable to the pages it affects.
• An automated check compares the two. It looks for changes to user-visible workflow, supported files, system requirements, models, languages, data transfer, consent, provider handling, key handling, trial and purchase presentation, settings and defaults, errors and recovery paths, export artifacts, evaluation formats, and localisation. A change in any of those raises a documentation task rather than being applied silently.
• Verification runs before publication. It checks that every English article has an Arabic counterpart, that generated pages still match their sources, that structured data parses, that no page contains a hard-coded price or an absolute privacy claim, and that no internal path or repository reference leaked into a public page.

Nothing on this site is auto-published from an AI-written draft: a drift check raises the task, a person reviews the change, and the corrected article is published only after verification passes.

Reporting something out of date

If a page here does not match what the app does, that is a bug in the documentation and worth reporting. Include the page, what it says, and what you actually see. See Contact support.