Captions, punch-in zooms, B-roll and chapters stop being your evening. Backstage Cut does the repetitive half of a creator edit inside Premiere Pro — long-form YouTube, Shorts, Reels and TikTok alike — and hands it back as ordinary clips and keyframes you can still move. No export, no second app, no client revision you have to redo from scratch. English, Hindi and Hinglish, detected automatically.
No credit card to start · $5/month beta pricing after that
None of it is hard. It's just slow, it's the same on every video, and it's the reason a two-hour edit takes five.
Hand-timing word-by-word captions for one Reel can take longer than the cut itself. Do that across a week of client videos and captioning is your job, not editing.
Short-form lives on zooms that hit the beat. Setting scale keyframes on each line, then nudging them frame by frame, is the same twenty minutes on every single video.
Export to a captions site, export again for B-roll, export again for chapters. Every hop is a re-render, a re-upload, and a new place for sync to drift.
Everything here assumes someone is talking to camera and the video ships this week. If that's your work, it saves you hours. If it isn't, we'd rather you knew before you installed it.
One pass through the words is the only thing you do twice — captions, zooms, chapters and B-roll all come off it, so nothing gets re-timed and nothing drifts out of sync.
Transcribe the sequence, or bring your own SRT. Every word is yours to fix before it becomes anything else.
Pick a look, place it over your own footage, save it as your house style — so you're not redesigning captions on every job.
It lands on your timeline as ordinary Premiere clips. Move them, retime them, hand the project to a client — no export, no round-trip, nothing to redo.
Roughly twenty videos a month for less than one coffee — and less than an hour of your own time is worth. Charged by transcribed minutes, so you only pay for the work you actually put through it.
Prove it on your own footage before you decide — a real video of your own, start to finish. No card, no server to run, no API key to manage.
Priced below what the transcription and AI cost us to run, because beta testers earn that. The rate goes up when we leave beta — join now and yours doesn't.
One package works on both, so there is no wrong download to pick. About three minutes, once — then your 30 free minutes start the first time you sign in from inside the panel.
On first launch the panel asks to download FFmpeg — a one-time download into your own user folder, not into Premiere. It is not bundled because the build with the encoder we need is GPL-licensed.
Backstage Cut is signed by us rather than by a commercial certificate authority — normal for an independent Premiere panel. If your installer mentions an unverified publisher, that only means it can't look our name up in a registry, not that anything is wrong with the file. It's safe to continue, and the panel's entire source is public on GitHub if you'd rather check for yourself.
Backstage Cut is used on real edits every week, but it is not finished. Expect bugs, occasional failed renders, and rough edges — and expect major changes between releases while features settle. Every tool shows you what it will do before it touches your timeline, and everything it creates is ordinary Premiere clips and keyframes, so your work survives an uninstall. Please still keep backups, and don't run it for the first time an hour before a deadline.
It's in beta. It's stable enough that it's used on real edits every week, but you should expect bugs, occasional failed renders, and rough edges. Every feature shows you what it will do before it touches your timeline — keep using that review step, and don't run it for the first time an hour before a client deadline.
$5/month is a beta price, well below what the underlying transcription and AI actually cost to run. It will go up once the product leaves beta. Anyone subscribed during beta keeps the beta rate for as long as their subscription stays active.
Expect major changes between releases while we're in beta — panels get reorganised, settings get renamed, and cached transcripts or presets may need regenerating after an update. What's already on your timeline is safe: every edit Backstage Cut makes is ordinary Premiere clips, keyframes, and cuts, so it stays exactly as it is even if you uninstall the panel.
Only audio. Backstage Cut extracts the audio from your active sequence and sends it for transcription. Your video never leaves your machine, and every render — captions, PIP, glass bubbles — happens locally.
Around 100 languages, powered by the same Whisper models OpenAI ships. Hindi, English and Hinglish work with automatic detection and no language picker needed - the normal case for Hinglish creators, who switch languages mid-sentence with no penalty. Every other supported language is one click away in a searchable picker, by English name, native script, or ISO code.
Cloud features stop and the panel tells you exactly how many minutes you've used. Nothing already on your timeline is affected, and your minutes reset on a rolling 30-day window.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2021 (15.0) or later, on macOS 10.15+ or Windows 10/11, 64-bit. Backstage Cut installs as a panel inside Premiere — you open it from the window menu like any other panel.
Yes. Cancel from the billing portal and you keep access until the end of the period you've paid for. No contract, no cancellation call.
Premiere Pro extensions ship as .zxp packages. Download BackstageCut.zxp, install the free ZXP Installer, and drag the .zxp onto it. Restart Premiere Pro and the panel appears under Window → Extensions → Backstage Cut. There is one package for both macOS and Windows — nothing about the download differs by platform.
It's signed by us rather than by a commercial certificate authority, which is normal for an independent Premiere panel. ZXP Installer accepts it without fuss. If your version of the installer does mention an unverified publisher, it only means it can't look our name up in a certificate authority's registry — nothing was found wrong with the file, and it's safe to continue. The panel's entire source is public on GitHub if you'd rather check for yourself.
About three minutes, once. Download and unzip, install the free ZXP Installer, drag the .zxp onto it, restart Premiere, then sign in and let the panel fetch FFmpeg on first run. Nothing after that is repeated — updates reinstall over the top and your settings, styles and saved transcripts survive.
Yes. It supports Premiere Pro 2021 (15.0) and every version since, including 2024 and 2025, on both macOS and Windows. It installs as an ordinary CEP panel, so it sits alongside whatever other extensions you already run.
Creator editors. If you cut long-form YouTube — talking head, podcast, tutorial, vlog — or Shorts, Reels and TikTok, for your own channel or for clients, every feature here is aimed at your week. It is not built for film, series, drama or broadcast finishing: those edits rarely want word-by-word captions or transcript-timed punch-ins, and nothing in the panel would earn its place.
Yes. Long-form is where chapters, silence cutting and AutoZoom save the most time, and the transcript is the same one your Shorts and Reels captions come off. A single 40-minute podcast edit and the six clips you cut out of it all run from one transcription.
Yes. Checkout runs on Stripe and takes cards worldwide in USD, so the $5/month works the same in India, Brazil, the Philippines, the UK or anywhere else Stripe accepts a card. Your bank handles the currency conversion, and you can cancel from the billing portal at any time.
Backstage Cut starts free: 30 minutes of transcription with every AI feature unlocked, no credit card. That is enough to caption, chapter and zoom several short videos before deciding whether the $5/month beta plan is worth it.
Thirty free minutes is a whole video, start to finish, on your own footage. If it doesn't save you the evening, you've lost nothing but the download.