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Useful Tools for Editors: It’s now 2025 edition

Useful Tools for Editors: It's now 2025 edition 17
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Scott Simmons
January 31, 2025
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Useful Tools for Editors: It's now 2025 edition 18

It’s a new year, and it’s time for new Useful Tools for Editors. As always, I’ve tried to include some things across the board that will help with editing and video creation, as well as some things that just might speed up your writing emails.

Multicam Flattener

One big shortcoming of Final Cut Pro is that if you are working in multi-cam, there is no way to flatten your multi-cams before moving to online, doing color or any real finishing of the edit. Leave it to workflow masters Automatic Duck to develop a utility to flatten multi-cams in Final Cut Pro. Automatic Duck has a long and storied history in our industry for solving problems and creating solutions where other solutions do not exist. And Multicam Flattener does that once again. I have not tried it out yet as the product just shipped, but in the Final Cut world, this has been a big ask, so it is worth leading this Useful Tools. Multicam Flattener is a workflow extension, so it works right within Final Cut Pro itself.

Multicam Flattener is $50 and available in the Mac App Store.

Wispr Flow

Yes your Mac has dictation built right into the OS but Wispr Flow takes that to the next level with amazingly fast and accurate dictation. Yes, I picked this as my one cool thing on a recent Alan Smithee Roundtable podcast but it had a different name then so here it is again. Image an AI-assisted dictation that is fast and scarily accurate that also attempts things like formatting. It does a really great job and it’s one tool that I am using on a daily basis outside of my editing application!

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There’s not much to the interface. If the above words dictated doesn’t seem like much it’s because I’ve been logging into it on different machines. It looks like your stats reset but I’m sure that’s because they would rather you subscribe on every machine. 🙄

Rarely do I post any affiliate links or anything like that but since Wispr Flow has them here it is!

TaskFlow for Adobe Premiere Pro

I love making to-do lists, and more than that, I love checking things off to-do lists. TaskFlow is a simple extension for Premiere that does just that and it’s my new favorite.

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You can add projects within the TaskFlow extension, so I see a different project for each … project. But the real magic happens once you go into a project. There you can have a todo list, items with dates as well as a list of those completed items. I always feel a sense of accomplishment when I’m able to check an item off of a todo list so this little tool makes perfect sense to me.

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You can also use it as a place to store notes, such as the color hex codes I’ve made a note of above. This will mean list tabbing over to NotionEverNoteKeepNotesNoteTakingApp just to grab a simple note. TaskFlow works in most Adobe applications as well. You can grab it from aedev.

TODO List for Premiere Pro and After Effects

How about another ToDo List for Premiere? PPro To-Do List is a simple and free todo list that might also be useful. Add items, tag them with a color, adjust their place in your list and perhaps get thing done!

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You can see visually how this ToDo list differs from the first one in this article and download whiter one might fit your sensibilities. While both are free you can name a price to support the developers if you do choose. TODO List also support After Effects and you can browse a number of other editing and post related items from the developer.

LosslessCut

Put this one in the category of “I’m not exactly sure what all it does and how to use it yet, but it’s looking like it could be a very useful tool.” LosslessCut says it is The Swiss Army Knife of Lossless Video/Audio Editing when you read over the bullet point list of features and usage scenarios you can see why they might make that claim.

The model is interesting as the developer says Lossless Cut will “always be free” and you can get it on GitHub. But if you don’t want to interface with GitHub you can also get a paid version of the Mac App Store and other places. This reminds me a lot of old mainstay HandBrake and a world with another tool like HandBrake is alright by me.  Now to figure this thing out.

SparkFX for Resolve

Many Useful Tools ago I mentioned a Resolve add-on called SuperBins. The creators of SuperBins is back with SparkFX to take your third-party Resolve tools to the next level. SparkFX is a package of things ranging from timeline and text tools to effect and transitions to shapes and overlays. You can also use the SparkFX application to interact with a number of the other tools from SparkFX, including SuperBins and SwitchTake.

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The SparkFX control panel runs as an application while you’re editing in Resolve and then uses Resolve’s scripting API to interact and add functionality to Resolve. There’s a number of tools within SparkFX marked as coming soon… so it looks like there will be more to come. There’s a number of different options and pricing but you can download SparkFX for free and see what all there is to offer.

 

Brevidy

Quickly creating social media and Tik Tok style captions are a bit of a holy grail for a lot of social media editors and Brevidy does just that. It actually does more than just transcribe and create social media captions. Brevidy will also use AI to automate the process of pulling short social-ready clips as well as suggesting stock footage, gifs, emojis and stickers. It’s a bit of a one-stop shop that might be really useful for social media content creators. As I feel like one of those tools that we’ll probably get new functionality added as the developers continue updating.

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There’s a ton of stuff here, and the ability to have AI suggest and find little animations, gifs and stock footage is quite fun. There’s so much going in on there it’ll take some work to figure out all the Brevidy does. Reading over the User Guide will give you a bit more details.

Brevidy uses its own AI for transcribing so this isn’t linked to Premiere’s internal transcription. I don’t think that’s a bad thing as there’s nothing wrong with having other options for transcription. And I’m guessing that allows Brevidy more controls for the features they include. Click on over to the pricing page to get an idea of what this will cost, but I that if the services Brevidy offers is part of what you have to do on a daily basis, it’ll be worth it. I think that SubMachine was the first tool to do these kinds of social media titles but now we’re getting a number of other options.

Captioneer

One more entry into the automated subtitling, social media animated graphics category would be Captioneer. It’s a simple tool that can use the subtitles created in Adobe Premiere Pro, and then combine that with a motion graphics template to give you animated titles that match the timing of the captions. While you don’t have to use the subtitles created in Premiere, that’s probably what most people will do. So it’s a pretty easy step to create animated titles with Captioneer. First you tell Captioneer where to get the caption data from, select the Motion graphics template to build from, set some parameters for the text input, and then hit create. It’s a pretty fast process, and you can go back and update the captions after the fact.

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Captioneer Ships with a number of pre-built motion graphics templates, but you can also point it to a folder of your own mogrts and use those as well. There’s a free trial for Captioneer but unlike a lot of these tools today, there’s an option for both a subscription as well as a one-time purchase, which is great to see the perpetual license still alive. The Captioneer store actually has other motion graphics templates to download for free, as the tool itself is the paid product. Of course, if you are good at building your own motion graphics, then you can roll your own mogrts and that’s part of what makes Captioneer really cool.

This insane 4.5 hour video on transitions

 

YouTuber Taran Van Hemert makes editing tutorials and occasionally, he makes insanely long editing tutorials, and this 4.5-hour one-on-one is insanely long. I scanned through it and there’s some good stuff in there. If you watch it at double speed it’s only a bit over 2 hours!

Links from TwitterX and perhaps other places.

 

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