Choose video and audio inputs

Prerequisites

• A video or an audio file in one of the supported containers, stored somewhere it can stay put until you have exported and imported the result.
• Optionally, when you start from a video, a separate microphone recording of the same take.

Supported file types

These are the same lists used everywhere a file reaches RoughCut: the drop zone, the browse panels, Finder's Open With, a drop on the Dock icon, and a Final Cut Pro share destination.

Steps

1. Choose New Rough Cut in the sidebar, under Studio.
2. Drag a video or an audio file onto the drop zone in the Choose your media box. It reads Drop a video or audio file here until a file is chosen.
3. Or click Browse Video… or Browse Audio… and pick the file from the open panel. An audio file alone is a complete input: RoughCut cuts it and exports an audio timeline.
4. To swap a file, drop another of the same kind on the zone — it now reads Drop to replace the video or audio — or use the browse button again. There is one video slot and one audio slot.
5. Only if you started from a video and recorded a separate microphone track of the same take, add that track with Browse Audio…. Skip this step otherwise.
6. Check the file chips under the drop zone. They show the filenames you selected, so you can confirm you picked the right take before spending a run.
7. To clear both files and start over, click Reset. It also restores the cut controls to your saved configuration defaults.

Expected result

The drop zone shows a chip for each file you chose, labelled Video or Audio, with a remove control on each. Process becomes available once a video or an audio file is present, the speech model is ready (or Pro Cloud transcription is selected), and no validation message is showing.

When a separate audio file helps

RoughCut extracts audio from the video automatically, so most video jobs need nothing else. The screen says so directly:

Choose a video or an audio file. With both, the audio is used for analysis and the timeline references the video. Your original files stay in place.

Adding an audio file next to a video changes what RoughCut listens to, not what it exports:

That is the whole reason to use it. A lavalier or shotgun mic recorded to a separate device is usually far cleaner than the camera's onboard microphone, and a cleaner signal produces a better transcript and better silence boundaries. The timeline you import into Final Cut Pro still points at the original video file.

When both files are present, the separate track must be synchronised with the video. Every cut time is measured against the audio RoughCut analysed. If the mic recording starts a second early, every cut in the exported timeline lands a second early too. If you are not certain the two are in sync, leave the audio slot empty and let RoughCut extract from the video.

Audio-only recordings

An audio file dropped on its own is not a "separate track" — it is the whole job. RoughCut detects silence, transcribes, runs the optional AI pass and writes an FCPXML whose clips reference that audio file in place, so a podcast or narration can be cut with exactly the workflow a video gets. The Pro annotated review timeline works on it too. An audio file sent from Finder or Final Cut Pro now offers both Transcribe and Make a Rough Cut in the chooser sheet.

Unsupported files

Dropping a file RoughCut cannot take shows this message, with the offending extension filled in:

Unsupported file type .<ext>. Video: mp4, mov, mkv, avi, m4v. Audio: wav, mp3, m4a.

Sending an unsupported file from Finder or Final Cut Pro produces the same refusal, named after the file:

RoughCut can't open "<name>". Video: mp4, mov, mkv, avi, m4v. Audio: wav, mp3, m4a.

The fix is the same in both cases: convert the file to one of the listed containers first, or export a supported version from the application that produced it.

An accepted extension is not a guarantee

The extension check looks at the container, not at the codec inside it. .mkv and .avi in particular are containers that can hold a very wide range of video and audio codecs, and some of what they can hold will not decode on macOS.

So a file can be accepted at the drop zone and still fail later, during the audio-extraction or probe stage. If you are working with anything unusual — an older camera, a screen recorder you have not used before, a download of unknown provenance — do this first:

1. Trim a short section, a minute or so, into its own file.
2. Run that short file through RoughCut.
3. Only commit the full recording once the short test completes.

A failed job costs you nothing: it does not consume one of your included cuts. What it costs is time, and a short test spends far less of it than a two-hour recording that fails at the end. See Understand job progress and cancellation.

Common mistakes

• Adding an unsynchronised audio file. The most damaging mistake on this screen, because the cut looks plausible and every timing is wrong.
• Adding the camera audio as a "separate" track. It is the same signal RoughCut already extracted. It gains you nothing.
• Adding an audio file next to a video and expecting a better picture. With both present, the audio track only affects analysis. The exported timeline references the video you chose.
• Moving or renaming the source file after processing. The exported FCPXML points at the original path, so Final Cut Pro reports the media as offline.
• Assuming an exotic container will work because it was accepted. Test it short first.

Troubleshooting

For format questions beyond the input stage, see Supported file formats. If a job fails outright, Troubleshooting by symptom covers what each message means.