Describe & Cut
Describe & Cut is a Windows desktop application that turns a folder of raw media into something you can read or watch. It has four working tools, each on its own tab: a Photo Describer, a Photo Collage Creator, a Video Describer / Shot-Charter, and a Video Editor.
The shot chart is the part that does the real work
Point it at a video file and four analyzers run over the whole timeline, each looking for a different thing, and their findings are merged into one chart:
- Scene — hard cuts and gradual transitions, giving the shot boundaries.
- Audio — speech, transcribed, with the language identified.
- Motion — where the action is, and where the camera is sitting still.
- Silence — pauses and dead air, which is how unusable stretches announce themselves.
You get two files back: a JSON one holding every event and a summary, and a Markdown table meant for a person to read. The reason both exist is that a shot chart has two audiences. An editor wants to skim a table and find the good bit. The next stage of the program wants structured data it can sort.
The editor goes in order, on purpose
Given a folder of footage and a one-line idea, the Video Editor decides which clips are usable, puts them in order, trims them to length and exports a finished video. The ordering is the part worth explaining, because the obvious choice is the wrong one.
It would be easy — and it is fashionable — to have a model reshape the footage into a narrative arc: a setup, a build, a climax. That was built, and it is not the default. Most of the time what somebody actually wants is a chronological pass through the clips that came out well: keep the good ones, throw away the junk, leave them in the order they happened. A holiday reel that has been dramatically restructured is no longer a record of the holiday. Narrative reshaping is still there as an opt-in for the cases that want it.
The models run on your machine
The free path uses Ollama to run the vision and planning models locally. No account, no API key, no upload, no per-minute charge, and it keeps working with the network off. Your footage is frequently the most personal material you own — family, home interiors, children, whatever was in shot by accident — and the case for keeping it on your own disk needs no elaboration.
There is also a path that calls Claude with your own API key, for when you want a larger model than your machine will hold. That one does send frames to a third party, which is why it is a deliberate choice rather than the default.
Where it stands
Private beta, and the current build has expired. Describe & Cut is distributed as a signed Windows installer to a small group of testers, not published. Each beta build carries a hard expiry date and refuses to launch afterwards, which is a deliberate mechanism to stop old builds circulating — and the build that exists as of this writing is past its date, so a fresh one has to be cut before anyone can run it.
There is no download here for that reason. If you have a use for it, the contact page reaches the developer.
What it needs
Windows, ffmpeg on the system path, and Ollama installed and running if you want the free local processing. The heavy lifting is done by OpenCV for the visual analysis and faster-whisper for transcription, both running locally.