FirstPass sits beside Resolve and talks to it directly. Point it at your stringout bins — it drafts your first cut back as a timeline in your project. No subscription, no servers, just your keys.
FirstPass reads your Resolve timelines. Not loose clips. Your source material, your multi-cam angles, your sync — all of it survives every pass.
Drop dialogue into a Resolve timeline the way it makes sense for the project. One interview. A day's stringout. A multi-cam panel. A five-hour oral history. Whatever shape you set it in, FirstPass reads it and gets to work.
Every select anchors to a phrase inside your source timeline. No re-encode. No flattened copy. No extra media on disk. Handles, sync, camera angles — untouched, no matter how many variants you run.
Your picks lift to V2 at their source positions. The rest of the interview sits on V1 underneath, frame-aligned. Drop to V1 to hear what came before the line, what came after, or what question produced it. Grab a handle. Extend the select. Without leaving the timeline.
The assembly is a compound clip pointing at your source timelines. Decompose it and every source clip, every multi-cam angle, every frame of metadata is right where you left it. Ready to finish the cut.
The selects pass. The paper edit. The recut. Every one of them lands on a Resolve timeline you can open and keep cutting.
The moments worth using — quotes, reactions, ambient beats — lined up on a stringout timeline, sorted by theme instead of by reel. Hold ⌘ and J/K/L through the transcript the way you'd go through a source tape. Each select anchors to a phrase in your source timeline, so the original stays whole. Recut as many variants as you want.
Drag the outline into the shape of the story. FirstPass writes a new timeline in Resolve whose clips are compound references to your sources — handles, sync, multi-cam angles all intact. Decompose later and every original is right where you left it.
"Open on the storm beat." "Tighter on the first act." "Lose the table-setting." Thirty seconds later a new assembly sits beside the last one. Keep what works. Throw away what doesn't.
Drop an interview in. The selects rise. The filler drops out. The stringout lands on a new Resolve timeline with cuts already made and markers already named.
Public beta, Apr 2026. Ingest, transcribe, analyze, selects, story — production-ready today. The assemble and refine stage buttons ship in v1.1. The underlying assembly tool already works; editors using the chat are driving it now.
One hundred seats at the Founding price, one shot. Perpetual license. Direct line to Josh. Your name on the credits page if you want it there.
After the 100th seat goes, the price resets to $149 and stays there. Your seat is a perpetual license for v1, 50% off v2 when it ships, your name on firstpass.app/credits if you want it there, and a direct line to Josh — the editor building this — when you need one.
FirstPass has shipped on one documentary so far — Deadly Runners Georgia, cut by its editor, on FirstPass. Founding Editors are the next to take it through a real film.
Transcription runs on AssemblyAI. Story analysis runs on Claude. Both on your own keys, at vendor cost. Before any job runs, FirstPass tells you the spend. Down to the minute of each source timeline. Nothing transcribes until you say go.
| source timeline | runtime | job | est. cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeadlyRunners_Georgia_Interview01.drt | 38:42 | AssemblyAI | $0.33 |
| DeadlyRunners_Georgia_Interview02.drt | 31:18 | AssemblyAI | $0.27 |
| DeadlyRunners_Georgia_Interview03.drt | 29:56 | AssemblyAI | $0.25 |
| story pass · 3 source timelines | — | Claude | $0.28 |
The stuff you'd want to know before putting a client's footage through any new tool.
Your original footage stays on your disk. Nothing uploads. FirstPass only ever sends the audio AssemblyAI needs to transcribe and the transcript text Claude needs to tag.
AssemblyAI and Anthropic run on your own accounts, at vendor cost. FirstPass doesn't mark up, proxy, or see either call. You set the spend caps in their dashboards.
Your API keys stay on your Mac — locked in the macOS Keychain. Never copied. Never synced. Not visible to us.
Every column matters to a working documentary editor. Only one tool clears all four.
| tool | price | local? | NLE | editor-founded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eddie AI | $167 / mo | cloud | multi-NLE | no |
| Descript | $16–50 / seat | cloud | own NLE | no |
| StoryToolkitAI | free | local | Resolve + Pr | — |
| IntelliScript | bundled · $295 | local | Resolve | no |
| FirstPass | $149 once | local | Resolve | yes |
Prices sourced from each vendor's public pricing page, Apr 2026. Verify before purchase.
Every fix. Every new feature. Every polish pass. Posted, dated, yours to read. The tool you buy today should still feel cared-for in six months.
Buy. Download. Drag across. The first Resolve project is usually open inside five minutes. Or install from Reactor, next to the rest of your Resolve toolbox.
For editors who already live in Reactor — FirstPass sits on the same shelf as Kartaverse and the rest of the community packages. No extra download. No extra install step.
Every editor who's been burned by a cloud AI tool asks these first. Short answers here. Longer ones in the docs.
[ make first pass → ] and a full assembly lands in Resolve in about 40 seconds. Do that before you point it at your own rushes.
$99 Founding Editor. Lifetime license for v1. 50% off v2 when it ships. Your name on the credits page if you want it there.