Welcome to Retakeless

If you’ve ever recorded a long-form YouTube video from a script, you already know the part of the edit nobody talks about: the slow, mechanical pass where you scrub the timeline looking for stumbles, re-reads, coughs, and false starts. It’s not creative work. It’s not storytelling. It’s tag-and-trim, and it eats two to four hours of every finished video.

Retakeless does that pass for you.

How it works

You upload your raw recording and the script you read from. Retakeless runs a transcription pass with word-level timestamps, hands the result plus your script to a large language model that knows what a “last complete attempt” looks like, and emits a clean FCPXML timeline. You import the FCPXML into DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro and pick up exactly where you’d normally start the creative part of the edit — b-roll, music, color, pacing.

We deliberately do not try to be a browser-based editor. Descript and Captions cover that audience well. If you already work in Resolve or Final Cut and you don’t want to switch tools just to skip the boring part, that’s the gap we fill.

What’s coming next

The MVP ships single-take long-form support. Multicam, MP4 export, and in-browser preview are explicitly out of scope while we focus on making the script-to-timeline path as reliable as possible. We’ll publish more here as we ship — pricing notes, behind-the-scenes on the matching algorithm, and footage from real creators using the tool.

If you’re recording your next video this weekend, you can sign up, upload the file, and have the FCPXML before you finish your coffee. That’s the promise. The rest of this blog is going to be the receipts.