CutNotes — Manual

Version 0.12.1 · iPhone · iOS 17 or later

CutNotes logs notes against timecode while you watch. Press play with the picture, tap a button when you spot something, and each note lands on the right frame. Notes export as subtitles that drop onto an editing timeline, and several people's notes combine into one attributed list.

For the shortest path to using it, see the quick start on the support page.

1. Sessions

A session is one viewing of one cut. Tap New session.

The last two fields appear in sequence mode only. The other two clocks have no timecode to set up, which is the point of them.

Sequence

The normal mode. You start the clock with the picture and it matches the edit's timecode. Both timecodes can be corrected afterwards without losing notes.

With editor

For when somebody else is holding the sync — you are watching with the editor, and they are running their own session against the picture.

There is no clock. No timecode, no play button, nothing to start. Open it and tap. Each note records the moment you tapped it, and the editor's session supplies the timecode afterwards.

These notes are not finished until they have been conformed. Until then their times read +0:10 — how long into your session the note was tapped, not where it sits on the edit. The notes list says so and offers the fix; see Conforming below. Send the CutNotes log to the editor, or take their session onto your phone, and conform.

Time of day

The clock reads the actual time of day. There is no transport and nothing to start — it is running before you open it. Use it on a shoot, or for logging anything live.

A time-of-day session cannot be paused. Closing it saves everything; the clock carries on regardless.

Pulled-down rates behave like a real generator. At 29.97 the displayed timecode falls behind the wall clock over a long day, exactly as jam-synced non-drop does. At 25 and 50 they are identical.

2. The board

Twelve buttons by default, three across and four down, in Premiere's own label colours — video Violet, audio Caribbean, text Lavender, graphics Rose, grade Yellow. A tile means what a clip means.

In sequence mode the buttons are inert until you press play. In the other two modes the session is live from the moment it opens.

The screen can be dimmed in Settings so it does not throw light at a review monitor.

3. Reaction time

By the time you have seen something and decided it is worth flagging, it has gone past. Every note is therefore placed slightly before you tapped.

The default is 1.5 seconds, adjustable in Settings. Individual buttons can override it: Flash Frame is set to 2.5 s because a flash frame is gone before you have decided it was one, and Caption / Typo to 0.5 s because a caption sits on screen a while.

Notes added by hand, or pasted from text, get no reaction time — a timecode you typed is the timecode you meant.

4. The notes list

Tap the notes count at the bottom right of the board, or open a session from the home screen.

• Add detail to any note by typing in its comment field.
• Tick a note off once it is dealt with. Ticks are yours alone — they are not

exported and do not travel to anyone else.

• Hide completed appears in the toolbar once anything is ticked, to tidy the

list. It resets each time.

• Add a note puts one in by hand at a typed timecode.
• Swipe a note to delete it.

Dictated notes show a play button until their transcript arrives. The recording stays on the phone; only the transcript is shared.

5. Correcting the clock

Reading it with the camera

Long-press the play button, or Read timecode with camera… in the ⋯ menu. Hold the box over the timecode on the edit. It closes itself as soon as it is sure and tells you what it locked to.

It does not trust a single reading. Five readings over about a second and a half have to advance at the session's frame rate before it commits anything — a misread does not survive that, and a wrong sync would put every note in the session out without saying so.

• Picture rolling → it resyncs to that moment. If the session's clock has not

been started, this starts it, so you never have to hit play on a cue.

• Picture parked → it sets the start timecode instead.

It refuses drop-frame — switch the edit's display to non-drop. Sequence mode only.

Ignore frames — the toggle at the bottom of the scanner. For when the session and the timeline are at different frame rates: a 50 fps timeline counts frames to 49, which a 25 fps session cannot produce, so half the readings get thrown out and it never locks. Turning this on reads the seconds and ignores the frames, which is accurate to about a second.

The scanner tells you when you need it — the toggle outlines itself and the message names the rate the timeline appears to be running at. It is remembered, so you only decide once per job. Leave it off when the rates match: the reader is frame-accurate then.

Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere: each frame is read on the phone and thrown away.

Correcting it by hand

Both are in the board's ⋯ menu, and neither loses any notes — every note is stored as a moment and re-timed when the clock changes.

Adjust start timecode — moves the whole session. Use it if you started late or typed the wrong start.

Resync to timecode — re-anchors from now on, leaving earlier notes alone. Use it if you have drifted, paused without the app, or scrubbed back.

Neither is available in time of day, where the phone's clock is the authority.

6. Sharing and exports

Share these notes… from the notes list, or Share… from the board menu.

Subtitles are measured from the start of the sequence, which is why Sequence starts at matters. Captions cannot overlap on one track, so a caption is cut off where the next begins; a shortened range states its true length in its own text.

Caption duration is set in Settings, 1 to 10 seconds.

7. Working with other people's notes

Combining

Combine notes… on the home screen. Tick several sessions and share them as one file. Every note keeps its author, and they interleave by timecode — correctly even when people were running at different frame rates.

Conforming

Everyone starts their own clock by hand, so a viewer who pressed play twelve seconds late has every note twelve seconds out. A combined export then interleaves them wrongly while looking perfectly plausible.

Long-press a session → Conform to another session…, pick your own session as the reference, and their notes are re-timed onto your clock using the moment each was tapped. No network is involved. It works for someone in the room, someone who watched remotely, and a file that arrives days later.

A with editor session is the same thing done deliberately: it has no clock at all, so conforming is not a repair but the last step of the job. Those sessions carry a Conform to the editor's session… button at the top of their own notes list, and read "needs conforming" on the home screen until it is done.

A session with no clock of its own is never offered as a reference — it has no timecode to lend.

Before committing, the sheet tells you what will happen:

• Placed exactly — your clock was running then.
• Placed approximately — tapped while your clock was paused. Pinned to where

the picture was parked.

• Cannot be placed — no timestamp, so it keeps its old position, which may no

longer mean anything. Check those afterwards.

Notes that arrive as text

Add text notes… on the home screen. Paste what somebody emailed and CutNotes reads the times out of it.

It understands 10:00:08:53, 00:08:53, 08:53, 1:23, 2.14 and bare seconds such as 35 secs. Ranges — 35-37 secs, 1:03 - 1:10, 1:20 to 1:25 — become range notes. Bullets, numbering and lead-ins like "At" are ignored.

Times are read as counting from the start of the sequence. A full four-part timecode at or past the sequence start is taken as written. So against a sequence starting at 10:00:00:00, 08:53, 00:08:53:00 and 10:08:53:00 all land on the same frame.

Nothing is discarded: a line it cannot read joins the note above it, and text before the first time becomes the session note. The preview shows exactly what will be filed before you commit.

8. Button sets

A set is the whole board — every button, its colour, where it sits, across every page, plus the note bar. Found at the top of Edit buttons.

The set that is ticked is the board. Editing buttons edits that set; there is no separate save step.

A session remembers the set it was logged with, so Carry on puts the same tiles back under the same fingers however many other sets you have used since. If that set has been deleted — or the session came from someone else's phone — the board you already have simply stays.

• New button set starts from the twelve defaults.
• Rename, Duplicate, Delete from the ⋯ beside each set.
• Share… produces a .cutbuttons file for AirDrop, email or Files. It is

plain readable text — it can be opened in a text editor and edited by hand, colours included, which are written as ordinary hex values.

• Import a set… takes one in.

Editing buttons

Arrange buttons… shows the real board. Drag a tile to move it; the rest reflow as you go. Tap a tile to rename it, recolour it, set its own reaction time, or delete it. + adds one.

Sixteen colours are Premiere's Classic labels, so a tile reads the way a clip does. The last swatch is the colour wheel, for anything else. Colours travel in the file as hex, so a set you share looks the same on every phone whatever colours it uses.

The list underneath does the same job in rows, and Advanced buttons toggles the dictate button and the note bar.

Board layout fits tiles to the screen automatically, or pins a fixed grid so the board is identical on every device — which is what tapping without looking needs.

9. Settings

About describes what the app does. Send feedback opens Mail with the version and device already filled in.

10. Worth knowing

Nothing leaves the phone unless you send it. Dictation is transcribed on-device and never uploaded, which matters when the cut is unreleased. Recordings stay on the phone even when the notes are shared.

Drop-frame timecode is not supported. Notes need to be right to the second, not to the frame. Frames are shown for a familiar format, not for frame accuracy.

Portrait only. Rotating the phone mid-press used to end a recording.

Sessions are plain files. They appear in the Files app under CutNotes, so a log can be recovered by hand if anything ever goes wrong.

TestFlight builds expire after 90 days.