Getting started with CutPilot

1. Install the plugin and the helper

CutPilot has two parts:

The plugin — the panel inside Premiere Pro (chat, Tools tab, Settings).
The CutPilot Helper — a small background app that does local media work the plugin can't (audio extraction, silence detection, transcription chunking) with ffmpeg bundled in.

Grab both from the download page. You need Adobe Premiere Pro 25.6 or later (the 2026 line).

Plugin install

Double-click the .ccx file — Creative Cloud installs it. Open it in Premiere via Window > UXP Plugins > CutPilot. The panel is dockable like any other Premiere panel.

Beta note: until the packaged .ccx ships, the plugin loads through Adobe's UXP Developer Tool (free, in Creative Cloud Desktop under Marketplace > All apps): install UDT, enable Developer Mode when it prompts, choose Add Plugin and select the plugin's manifest.json, then Load. Premiere must be running.

Helper install

Run the macOS or Windows installer. It installs the helper, starts it, and writes a private access token to your user profile (~/Library/Application Support/CutPilot/ on macOS, %APPDATA%\CutPilot\ on Windows). The plugin reads that token to talk to the helper — no other app can.

First run

Open the panel and check the Setup tab: it pings the helper and shows a green health check when everything is connected. Your 14-day full trial (every Pro feature, no card) starts on first run.

2. Get an API key (BYOK)

CutPilot's chat, captions and translation run on your own AI provider account — that's the BYOK (bring your own key) model. You create a key once, paste it into Settings, and it's stored in Premiere's secure storage (never in a plain file, never sent to us).

What it costs

You pay the provider's API rates directly, with no markup. Realistic expectations:

A typical chat-driven edit session: about $0.01–$0.10 of API usage.
Transcribing footage for captions: roughly $0.006 per audio minute with OpenAI Whisper (an hour of footage is about $0.36). Gemini audio input is similarly inexpensive.
Silence cutting and filler removal: $0.00 — analysis runs locally; filler detection uses the existing transcript.

Most editors spend far less per month on API usage than a single plugin subscription would cost.

OpenAI

Sign in at platform.openai.com (this is the API platform — separate from ChatGPT Plus).
Add a payment method and, optionally, a monthly spending limit (for example $5) under Billing.
Create a key under API keys > Create new secret key and copy it — it's shown once.

One OpenAI key powers both chat (GPT models) and Whisper transcription for captions.

Anthropic (Claude)

Sign in at console.anthropic.com.
Add billing credit (you can start with a small prepaid amount).
Create a key under API Keys and copy it.

Claude handles chat and editing plans. Anthropic has no transcription API, so if you caption with a Claude key, CutPilot will ask for an additional OpenAI key just for the transcription step (or use Premiere's native transcript, which needs no key at all).

Google Gemini

Sign in at aistudio.google.com.
Choose Get API key and create one in a project.
Copy the key. Gemini has a free usage tier; add billing for higher limits.

One Gemini key covers chat and audio transcription.

Treat API keys like passwords: don't share them or commit them anywhere. You can revoke a key at the provider and paste a new one into Settings at any time. Set a spending cap at the provider if you want a hard ceiling.

3. Understand the privacy & helper security model

Short version: your media and prompts go directly to your chosen AI provider under your account. Our servers only ever see license keys.

The helper is localhost-only. It binds to 127.0.0.1 exclusively and is never reachable from your network, let alone the internet.
Token-authenticated. Every request to the helper needs the per-install token written by the installer. A wrong or missing token is rejected. No other local process can drive it.
Keys in secure storage. API keys live in Premiere's UXP secureStorage, not plain files.
License traffic only. The only thing that ever contacts a CutPilot server is license activation/validation: your license key plus an anonymous machine fingerprint. No media, no prompts, no API keys, no analytics on your content.
Offline-tolerant. Silence cutting and timeline tools work with no internet at all; a Pro license tolerates 14 days offline between checks.

4. Your first silence cut

Open a sequence with some talking-head footage, then open the Tools tab and choose Silence Cut. Options:

Option	Default	What it does
Threshold	-40 dB	How quiet counts as "silence". Raise it (e.g. -35) for noisy rooms, lower it (e.g. -50) for clean studio audio.
Minimum silence	0.5 s	Gaps shorter than this are kept — protects natural pauses between words.
Padding	0.15 s	Breathing room kept on each side of every cut so speech never feels clipped.
Preview as markers	on for first runs	Instead of cutting, drops a "Silence n" marker on every detected range so you can scrub and judge before committing.

When you run it for real, CutPilot shows a plan preview first — how many cuts, how much time removed. Confirm, and the whole cut list applies as one undo step (Edit > Undo "CutPilot: …" reverts everything at once). Detection is local and free on every plan, with no length cap.

Remove Fillers works the same way: it reads the sequence transcript, proposes cuts for filler words ("um", "uh") and immediate retakes, and routes through the same plan preview.

5. Captions and languages

From the Tools tab choose Generate Captions, or just ask in chat ("caption this in English").

Transcript source: if you've already transcribed the sequence with Premiere's built-in speech-to-text, CutPilot uses that — free and instant. Otherwise the helper extracts the audio, splits it into chunks, and transcribes through your OpenAI (Whisper) or Gemini key.
Languages: transcription supports the ~100 languages Whisper covers. On Pro, an AI translation pass can produce captions in additional languages in one run. The free tier covers 1 caption language on sequences up to 10 minutes.
Import flow: Premiere's plugin API doesn't yet let plugins author caption tracks directly, so CutPilot writes a clean .srt file and walks you through the two-click import: Text panel > Captions > Import captions from file. Cue timings land exactly on your sequence.

6. Your first chat edit

Switch to the Chat tab and try:

Cut the silences in this sequence, then add a small punch-in
on every cut so the jump cuts are hidden.

CutPilot snapshots your sequence, plans the edit with real timeline tools, and shows the plan for approval before anything changes. After it applies, the chat shows a readable changelog of exactly what was done. If you don't like it — one undo.

Other prompts to try:

"Describe my timeline."
"Trim 2 seconds off the start of the first clip."
"Add a marker at every scene change in the first minute."
"Cut silences, caption in English, then queue a 9:16 export." (pipelines — the whole chain previews before running)

Next steps

Hit a snag? See FAQ & troubleshooting — helper offline, invalid key and empty-sequence issues are covered there.
Curious about plans and limits? See pricing.
What's new? See the changelog.