Selects Now Automates the Hardest Part of Long-Form Editing

When we first started building Selects, we weren’t trying to make editing faster in small ways. We were trying to remove the parts of editing that almost everyone dreads so that they can enjoy their editing experience more. Our mission has always been to make storytelling accessible to everyone by streamlining the video editing workflow. In doing so, we’re enabling more video editors and creators the ability to focus on what really matters: narrative and creativity.

For anyone working with long-form video, podcasts, interviews, talk shows, or dialogue-heavy content, the first hours of editing are rarely creative. They’re spent syncing cameras, aligning audio, labeling speakers, creating endless markers, cutting unusable moments, and building a timeline that’s clean enough to actually work in.

With the latest release of Selects, we’re taking a major step toward a new baseline for AI-assisted long-form video editing, one where editors don’t start from a blank timeline or messy footage, but from a structured, editable draft built automatically.

From raw footage to structure, automatically

Selects is designed to handle the front half of editing: the work that traditionally falls on assistant editors or junior editors before any creative decisions can happen.

With this release, Selects now allows you to:

• Switch to the active speaker without manual keyframing

• Detect the highest-quality audio source and mute cross-talk

• Automatically segment clips by topic for faster review

• Identify unusable clips and remove them from your timeline instantly

• Generate storyline-aligned timeline drafts by prompt-based command

Instead of manually assembling a stringout or pulling selects, editors can drop in raw footage and receive an editable assembly cut in minutes.

Why podcasts are the proving ground for an AI video editor

While Selects works across many long-form formats, podcast editing remains the clearest stress test for automation.

Podcast editing workflows combine nearly every hard problem in video editing:

• Long runtimes

• Multi-camera setups

• Multiple audio sources

• Conversational pacing

• Repetitive prep work before storytelling even begins

If AI can handle podcasts well, it can handle most long-form content.

That’s why podcasters, podcast editors, and YouTube studios cutting interview-driven content have become the earliest and strongest adopters of Selects. The time savings are immediate, and the impact compounds across episodes.

A shift from video editing tools to focus on video production workflows

Many editing tools focus on isolated actions: removing silences, cutting filler words, or generating clips. Those features matter, and Selects includes them, but they don’t solve the larger problem.

The real bottleneck in long-form editing is structure.

Selects targets that bottleneck by automating how a timeline comes together in the first place. Through automated assembly cuts, although the result isn’t a finished video, it’s something more valuable: a clean, organized starting point that preserves creative control while eliminating hours of mechanical work.

Built to work with real editors, not replace them

Selects isn’t a replacement for professional video editing software. As an AI-powered video editor, it’s designed to work alongside it.

Editors can review, rearrange, and refine timelines inside Selects, then hand off directly to Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve for finishing, color, detailed sound design, graphics, and final polish.

In practice, this mirrors the role of an assistant editor: preparing footage so senior editors can focus on pacing, emotion, and story.

Selects is setting a new expectation for long-form editing

Long-form video editing has lagged behind short-form when it comes to automation. This release is our attempt to close that gap and reset expectations for what AI should handle before an editor ever touches the timeline.

For teams producing podcasts, interviews, or any form of long-form content at scale, Selects represents a shift from manual prep to automated structure.

And this is only the beginning.

Selects is available today with a free 7-day trial.

For more in-depth knowledge about the ins and outs of video editing, check out our latest posts on the Cutback blog or our YouTube channel.