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Image Automatically create a rough cut from your raw footage by keeping the meaningful sections and removing filler, silence, or irrelevant content—based on your creative intent. This tile is useful when you want to quickly condense long-form footage into a cleaner baseline edit that focuses on what matters (story, insights, mood, etc.) without manually scrubbing timelines.

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How It Works

The Rough Cut tile analyzes your footage and applies edits based on your prompt, not just simple silence trimming. You tell Mosaic what kind of cut you want, and Mosaic will:
  • Detect meaningful segments
  • Remove dead air or unimportant parts
  • Preserve emotional, narrative, or informational beats
  • Produce a condensed timeline you can build on
This is helpful for podcasts, interviews, educational content, commentary, documentaries, and narrative storytelling.

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Input Fields & Controls

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1. Creative Intent Prompt (Required)

“What do you have in mind?”
This prompt defines the logic of your cut. You must describe the type of cut you want, e.g.:
  • “Highlight only the parts where the speaker gives key takeaways.”
  • “Cut everything except the emotional or dramatic beats.”
  • “Keep moments that explain the step-by-step process clearly.”
  • “Select moments that are funny, sarcastic, or have comedic timing.”
  • “Make an efficient, fast-paced summary version under 90 seconds.”
This prompt controls what stays and what gets cut.

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2. Quick Suggestions (Optional, Helpful)

For users who don’t know what to write, we offer quick suggestion buttons that express common creative patterns. Current suggestion categories include:

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Storytelling & Narrative

  • “Highlight only the parts where the speaker gives key insights or takeaways.”
    Good for educational, commentary, or informational content.
  • “Cut everything except the emotional or dramatic moments.”
    Useful for documentaries or vlogs.

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Tone & Mood

  • “Create an inspirational cut with uplifting moments.”
    Ideal for motivational content and speeches.
  • “Make a suspenseful cut by keeping tense or uncertain moments.”
    Good for storytelling, drama, or reactions.
These presets act as creative shortcuts for new users.

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Best Use Cases

Use Rough Cut when you need to:
  • Remove boring or repetitive sections
  • Shorten long recordings
  • Extract narrative arcs
  • Highlight key insights
  • Condense story beats
  • Prepare footage for clips
  • Prepare podcasts for social platforms
Common use cases include:
  • Long podcast → short narrative episode
  • Interview → highlight reel
  • Commentary → tight opinion piece
  • Vlog → emotional storyline
  • Reaction video → suspense or humor highlights

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What Rough Cut Actually Outputs

Depending on your prompt, you’ll get a video where:
  • Filler sections are removed
  • Dead air is trimmed
  • The main content is preserved
  • Emotional or narrative beats remain intact
  • Silence or irrelevant context is skipped
This results in a clean foundation you can then send to:
  • Clips tile (to extract short videos)
  • Captions tile (to add subtitles)
  • Reframe tile (to convert to 9:16 / TikTok)
  • Montage tile
  • Destination tile (for export)

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How This Tile Fits Into a Workflow

Typical rough cut workflows look like: Long Form → Rough Cut → Clips → Reframe → Captions → Export or Raw Podcast Footage → Rough Cut → Captions → Destination or Interview Footage → Rough Cut → AI B-roll → Export Rough Cut saves hours of early editing work.

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Pro Tips

  • The more specific your prompt, the better the cut.
  • Avoid vague instructions like “just make it better.”
  • Mention what to keep, not just what to remove.
  • Mention mood if you care about emotional curation (e.g., “uplifting,” “funny,” “tense”).
  • If you want short-form highlights, combine with Clips.

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Example Prompts

Here are good prompt structures users can paste directly: Informational:
“Keep only the sections where the speaker explains key concepts or answers questions.”
Educational:
“Highlight moments that explain frameworks or actionable advice.”
Emotional:
“Keep emotional reactions, laughter, suspense, and heartfelt moments.”
Motivational:
“Extract inspiring sentences and moments where the speaker offers wisdom.”
Clip Prep:
“Produce a high-signal rough cut that’s suitable for extracting shorts.”