CutNotes
Notes against timecode,
without looking away.
Press play when the cut starts rolling and tap a button whenever you spot something. Every tap lands on the right frame — 10:04:31:12 — while your eyes stay on the picture.
Join the beta iPhone · iOS 17 or later · free while in beta
Big buttons, no looking
Twelve tiles by default — Change Shot, Audio, Grade, Flash Frame, whatever you actually say out loud. Rename them, recolour them, drag them where your thumb already goes.
They are in Premiere's own label colours, so a tile means what a clip means: video, audio, graphics. Recognition beats prettiness when you are not looking at the screen.
Hold a button instead of tapping and the note becomes a range, with a start and an end.
Or just say it
Hold the mic and speak. The phone records your mumbling and transcribes it on the device — nothing is uploaded, which matters when the cut is embargoed.
The note is timestamped the moment you press, not when you finish talking, so taking your time costs nothing.
Point the camera at the timecode
The one thing that has to be right is the sync — and pressing play on a cue is the easiest thing in the world to get wrong.
So don't. Long-press play, hold the box over the timecode on the edit, and CutNotes reads it and anchors itself. It refuses to guess: it watches the number for a second and a half and only commits when it is behaving like a clock, because a wrong sync would quietly put every note in the session out.
Works with Premiere, Avid, Resolve — anything with a timecode on screen.
Subtitles onto your timeline
Export .srt and drop it on the sequence. Every note comes back
as a caption over picture, at the frame it was flagged. Spreadsheet and
plain text too.
Everyone in the room
Each person logs on their own phone. The files merge into one list in timecode order, with names attached — and CutNotes re-times them onto your clock so nobody's late start throws the order out.
Notes that arrive as text
Paste an email full of times — 08:53, 1:23, "35 secs", "1:03 - 1:10" — and they file themselves alongside the rest.
Logged a beat late?
Every note is placed slightly before you tapped, because by the time you have decided something is worth flagging it has gone past. Per button, so a flash frame gets more than a typo.
Shoots as well as cuts
A time-of-day clock that is running before you open it, with nothing to start and nothing to get wrong.
Button sets
Build a board for drama, one for sport, one for the grade. Share them as a file — they are plain readable text, and they arrive intact.
Nothing leaves your phone
Not a policy, an architecture: CutNotes contains no networking code at all. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics and no server to send anything to. Notes, recordings and transcripts sit in the app's own folder on the device.
Dictation is transcribed on-device. Camera frames are read and thrown away — nothing is recorded. Your notes go somewhere only when you choose to share the file yourself. The full detail is here.
Still early. Already changed how I watch a cut.
CutNotes is in beta on TestFlight. If you sit through review cuts and have never found a decent way to take notes — or you have a feature you would want — come and try it.
Join the TestFlight beta Built by a video editor, for the way cuts actually get watched.