Paperedit reads your brief, pulls the best beats from every interview you've shot, and drops a first cut straight into your DaVinci Resolve bin. The paper-edit phase that used to eat two days now takes under thirty minutes — and you still edit the result normally.
Every documentary editor knows the drill. Read transcripts twice. Circle the good lines. Cross out the stumbles. Draw arrows linking a beat in Act I to a callback in Act III. The paper edit.
It's the phase where the film actually gets made. And it's hours of eye-strain nobody shows on the reel. Paperedit makes that phase feel like editing — not copyediting.
Here's the math on a typical four-interview hero cut. The "before" numbers are what a working documentary editor actually spends on the paper-edit phase. The "after" numbers are measured — not projected.
Each stage produces a durable artifact Paperedit versions and tracks. Jump in or out at any point — you're always in charge.
Every feature lives inside your normal Resolve workflow. Phrase subclips land in bins. Drafts get markers. Smart queries feel like Smart Bins. Nothing new to learn — just less mechanical work to do.
This is the headline feature. Write a paragraph: target duration, tone, must-include beats, must-avoid framings. Paperedit pulls the best phrases from every interview, composes them into a dialogue spine, and drops a versioned timeline in your 02 Claude Drafts bin. Open Resolve. Press play. Iterate from there.
Paperedit slices your interview timeline at every natural pause. The ums, uhs, and half-seconds of dead air get cut out. What's left is a clean library of phrase-length subclips — each one a beat you can actually use.
Claude reads each phrase and assigns story tags — theme, narrative role, emotion, quotability, sensitivity. The tags get written into your source clips' Keywords field. Your media pool finally knows what every line is about.
Ask for "the top five thesis phrases tagged triumph, under eight seconds, skipping anything sensitive." Get a ranked list back. Same instinct as a Resolve Smart Bin — but for story beats across every interview you've shot.
Trim clips, reorder beats, add a new line from source. When you're ready for a new draft, Paperedit reads your timeline back, keeps your micro-trims as raw in/outs, matches what it can to phrase IDs, and regenerates without wiping a frame.
Paperedit points at your interview timelines as compound clips — so your Zoom field audio, your lane-replaced dialogue, all your manual A1/A2 balancing comes along automatically. No OMF, no re-linking, no "which audio is on which track."
Each draft records the hash of the transcripts, phrases, and analyses it was built from. Regenerated one upstream? Paperedit warns you which drafts are stale. No more guessing whether v8 matches your latest sync.
Resolve editors shouldn't have to learn a new paradigm. Everything Paperedit does maps to something you already know — with a few quality-of-life improvements baked in.
Every regen lands in 02 Claude Drafts as _draft_v8. v7 stays put so you can scrub and A/B. No "save as."
Each placed clip gets a source/reason/transcript marker. Open the Marker Index and read your cut's decisions top to bottom.
Yellow for transitions. Red for staccato passages. Green where the recovery breathes. Editorial intent, visible before you press play.
The 2-second pause you dropped between Act G and Act H stays there. Your pacing decisions survive every round trip.
Clear every Blue annotation off a finishing draft in one command before handoff. The paper cut Resolve never fixed — fixed.
A browsable timeline with every phrase pre-trimmed, filtered by theme, marker-tagged. Like a scene-pull reel made from language.
Analysis tags fill in automatically. Make Smart Bins for "lineage" or "storm." Your metadata finally matches the footage.
Queue the render from the pipeline — or one-shot it via Quick Export. Presets and targets respected. No FCPXML round-trips.
Doesn't flatten your synced audio. Your Zoom field audio rides with every selected beat. Your A1 stays your A1.
When Paperedit ships a new field, your existing files upgrade silently. No "project needs to be updated" dialogs.
No subscription. No per-seat nonsense. Buy once, use on every documentary you'll ever cut. Updates included.
Less than a month of Criterion Channel.
You'll use it way more. promise.
Paperedit isn't trying to replace your judgment. It's giving you back the hours you spend on the tasks that don't require any — trimming silences, searching transcripts, copy-pasting timestamps, remembering what you found in session 3 that the subject also said better in session 1.
You still choose the order. You still choose the cut. You still decide whether the storm beat lands before or after the return home. You just don't spend an afternoon finding it.
$10, one-time. Try it on your current project. 30-day refund if it's not worth ten times that.