A quick tour

The four spaces inside ReelChest and how they fit together. Five minutes to get your bearings.

ReelChest has four spaces. Knowing which one you're in saves a lot of time.

The Library

The grid you land in. Every clip you've added shows up as a tile, sortable by name, date added, date modified, duration, or size. Click a tile, the inspector on the right shows the file's tags, color label, rating, and (once it's transcribed) the words. Hover a tile and the preview plays.

The sidebar on the left is sources, projects, paper edits, mosaics, and tags. Pinning a tag floats it to the top of the tag list. Adding a source folder watches that folder, so files you drop in later just appear.

The Library is the entry point. Most days, this is where you start: bring in footage, transcribe it, then peel off into a paper edit or a mosaic.

The Paper Edit

A panel where you stack clips into an order. You add a clip (whole asset by default), trim its words back with two drag handles, then add the next clip. The script reads top-to-bottom in the order you added them. Each row has a checkbox: untick a row to drop it from the cut without losing your trim.

The assembly player at the right plays the cut seamlessly across rows. Transport bar underneath: play, frame step, skip clip, jump to start or end. Loop modes are off, all, or one.

This is the tool for "I know roughly what I'm saying, let me build the order."

The Mosaic Editor

Different beast. You write the sentence you want to hear in a text box, then hit Submit. The matcher walks every transcribed clip in the project and splices together verbatim word and phrase matches into a finished cut. When the same phrase exists in more than one clip, the alternates surface in a strip below the script.

Below that, a timeline ribbon shows the assembled cut. Click any block to focus that splice and audition the alternates. Lock a take you like and the next time you re-submit the matcher won't touch it.

This is the tool for "I want to build something nobody actually said as a sentence." Pull words from anywhere you've recorded. Honest about what it is: one output per cut, not a multi-aspect-ratio short-form factory.

The Captions Editor

Where the words become titles on screen. It opens in five places: right-click a clip in the Library, the Inspector's "Edit Transcript" button, double-click a row in a Paper Edit, hit Edit Captions in a Mosaic, or use the keyboard from a clip selection.

Four tabs: Captions (edit text and timing), Style (font, color, outline, shadow, glow), Position (9-zone anchor and margins), Animation (eight presets including type-on, word reveal, and a few classics). Real-time preview in the player as you tweak.

Export the captions to FCP as editable titles, to Premiere or Resolve as .srt, bake them into the video as pixels, or render an alpha-channel .mov you composite on top in your editor of choice.

Workflows that work

There's no one canonical flow. People use ReelChest for very different jobs. Pick the lane that matches what you're trying to do.

Curating selects. Some projects never leave the Library. Add sources, let footage transcribe in the background, tag and color-label as you go, filter to the keepers, hit ⌘⇧E to send selected clips to FCP's event browser. You never have to open a Paper Edit or a Mosaic to get value out of the app.

Pre-planning a deliverable. Project Tags. Make a named project in the sidebar, drag in the assets that belong to this deliverable (or subscribe the project to a set of tags), do your tagging and rating pass on the bundle, then right-click the project → Send to Final Cut Pro. The whole project lands in FCP as a single event with every keyword, color label, and Favorite carried across. The cleanest pre-production handoff in the app.

Captions on a single clip. Some projects only need words on screen. Right-click a clip, open the Captions Editor, do the word-level edits, tune style, position, and animation per segment if you want it, then export as FCP titles, baked-in pixels, alpha-channel MOV for compositing elsewhere, or sidecar SRT. The Captions Editor is built to stand on its own. Many people will use the app primarily for this.

A rough cut from selects. Paper Edit. Stack the clips you want, trim the words at the edges with the drag handles, get the order right, send to FCP and finish there. The closer-to-FCP workflow.

A new shape from existing footage. Mosaic. Write the sentence you want to hear, hit Submit, the matcher splices verbatim word and phrase matches from your corpus. Useful for "I have hours of interviews and I need a 90-second answer," or for building a line nobody actually said as a sentence.

Working an existing FCP library. ReelChest can browse a Final Cut Pro library directly, not just folders of raw files. Tags, keywords, and ratings come across, and what you tag or label in ReelChest can roundtrip back to FCP. Good for projects that already live in an FCP event and just need the search, transcript, and curation tools we add on top.

Mix. Most ambitious projects use a few of these. Curate first, build a spine in a Paper Edit, let a Mosaic fill the connective tissue, finish captions for whatever needs them on screen. There's no order you're supposed to follow.

That's the app. The rest of this guide is detail.