v0.8.0

ButterCut gets Multi-track editing, a new Preview app, and better support for misc production tasks

ButterCut Pro gets a new Preview app for viewing libraries, clips, settings and more. We'll add more features based on your requests. (I want to add a characters feature so Claude doesn't ask for the thousandth time if I'm the one in the video.)

We've also added the initial ability to edit multi-track videos. It works well for adding b-roll clips after creating an initial spine (a-roll story) as well as for working between a/b cameras. Beyond that we might need more work to help the agent understand what's happening at each second.

Preview and multi-track are in ButterCut Pro. $49 a year. 20 percent off with coupon QYOTC4OA. Learn more at buttercut.io.

Pro and Core both add the ability to add photos to libraries and mute clips (nice for B-roll), plus a new 'buttercut' home menu skill that makes your first ButterCut chat more welcoming.

ButterCut Pro

• Multi-track timelines. Lay B-roll and cutaways over a continuing voiceover instead of hard-cutting to them. Pro cuts can place a clip on a second video track; the free edition stays single-track.
• Preview libraries and clips inside Claude. A Claude Desktop panel for browsing a library's clips and cuts and handing work back to ButterCut — add footage, start a cut, pull a full transcript, change settings, or run a one-off task — without leaving the conversation.
• Installation improvements. Smoother, terminal-free setup. Claude brings over existing libraries too.

ButterCut Pro & Core

New & Improved

• Misc tasks now have a home. Project-tied one-offs (a stray transcription, a thumbnail, quick notes) save into a library's new misc/ folder; standalone jobs land in a dated misc/<date>/<task>/ folder; large scratch files go to tmp/ and finished exports go to your Desktop — never bloating your library.
• Add photos to your libraries. Libraries now hold still images (JPEG and PNG) alongside your video footage.
• Start from a home menu. Type "/buttercut" (or "/bc") and ButterCut welcomes you, asks what you'd like to do (start a cut, add footage, or a one-off task), and hands you to the right place. Less daunting than typing from scratch.
• Cut from a script. Hand ButterCut a written script and it finds the footage that delivers each line, then builds the cut in script order.
• Silence a clip in a cut. Cuts now have the ability to mute clips. Handy for B-roll and multi-track work.
• More resilient installs. Setup now leaves a small note (.buttercut_env) recording how it installed Ruby, Python, and WhisperX on your Mac, so future sessions can use it to find ButterCut dependencies — one of several setup resiliency improvements.
• A missing ffmpeg/ffprobe now fails fast with a clear "run the setup skill" error instead of a cryptic command-not-found buried in subprocess output. The contact-sheet skill's repair instructions point at the setup skill accordingly.
• Setup now pins WhisperX to the tested combination (whisperx==3.4.2, pyannote-audio==3.4.0 — matching requirements.txt), so fresh installs can't drift onto untested releases (pyannote-audio 4.x breaks whisperx 3.4.2).
• ffmpeg/ffprobe calls now resolve through MediaTools: static builds placed in the gitignored dependencies/ directory take precedence, falling back to PATH. Nothing changes if you don't use dependencies/ — existing installs keep their PATH ffmpeg.
• Libraries now include a misc/ directory for project-tied one-off artifacts. New libraries get it automatically (it's part of Library::SUBDIRS); existing libraries get it created on demand the first time the misc-task skill needs it. A new gitignored top-level misc/ directory holds standalone one-off task output, organized as misc/<date>/<task>/.

Fixed

• Premiere clips fill the frame. Footage shot at a different size than your sequence now scales to fit when you export to Premiere, matching how Final Cut and Resolve already behaved.