Cut Room is the video editor built into ProPlayVision. It opens in its own window alongside X's O's Chalkboard, so you can trim, arrange and finish a piece without leaving for another program.
It is a real timeline editor: multiple clips, transitions, keyframes, voiceover, and offline rendering to MP4 or WebM.
Getting a clip in
Get takes pulls in anything the Chalkboard has sent over. This is the usual route — record in the Chalkboard, then press Get takes here.
Import media loads a file from your computer.
From the Chalkboard side, three doors send a clip across: Send Loaded Clip To Cut Room in the Studio tab, the 🎬 button on any DVR vault clip, and automatic hand-off after a recording.
A live feed cannot be sent. A live feed is a stream of frames, not a file. Arm the DVR, capture what you want, and send the DVR clip instead.
The tools
Seven tools sit above the timeline. Each has a single-key shortcut.
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Select | V | The default. Move clips, drag their edges to trim. |
| Blade | B | Click a clip to cut it at that point. |
| Ripple | T | Trim one clip and everything after it slides to close the gap. |
| Roll | R | Move the join between two clips. The pair keeps its total length. |
| Slip | Y | Change which part of a clip plays without moving the clip. |
| Slide | U | Move a clip between its neighbours; they absorb the change. |
Ripple is the one worth learning first. Ordinary trimming leaves a hole where the footage was. Ripple closes it for you, which is what you want nine times out of ten when cutting dead air out of a play.
Slip is the one people miss. If a clip is in the right place but showing the wrong three seconds, slip moves the footage inside the clip without disturbing anything around it.
Playback and navigation
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Space | Play / pause |
← → | One frame back / forward |
Shift + ← → | One second back / forward |
Home | Jump to the start |
End | Jump to the end |
F | Full screen preview |
S | Split at the playhead |
Delete | Delete the selected clip |
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z | Undo / redo |
Marks and markers
In and out define the range you care about. I sets in, O sets out. Clear range removes them.
Markers are notes on the timeline. M drops one at the playhead, or double-click the ruler. , and . jump between them. Clear marks removes them all.
Use in/out for what you're going to export or send back. Use markers for the moments you want to find again.
Snapping
N toggles snapping. With it on, clip edges pull to other clip edges, markers, the playhead and your in/out marks.
Leave it on for assembling. Turn it off when you need a cut at an exact frame and the snap keeps pulling you a few frames away.
Transitions
Cut Room has 30 transitions, dragged from the bin onto the cut you want.
The drop target is the leading third of the incoming clip, not the whole clip. A transition belongs to the head of the clip coming in, so dropping it anywhere would be ambiguous once two clips touch.
The ones you'll actually use:
Cross Dissolve — both clips play at once, one fading down as the other comes up. The workhorse. Softens a cut without drawing attention. Best between two shots of the same play or subject.
Fade — the incoming clip fades up from nothing. Use it at the very start of a piece.
Dip to Black — down to black at the midpoint, then up. The classic scene break; reads as time passing or a change of subject.
Dip to White and Flash — sharper, more energetic. Suits a highlight package more than a breakdown.
Push, Slide, Cover, Reveal — one clip moves the other off screen. Good for comparing two things.
Punch In, Pop, Camera Shake, 3D Flip — attention-grabbers. Effective once, tiring if repeated.
There are also wipes (Circle, Clock, Radial, Diamond, Rectangle) and a set of title and graphic transitions — Lower Third, Score Bug, Roster Plate, Number Badge, Corner Tag, Big Card, Flag, Boxed, Plain.
Each transition carries its own description in the interface. Hover to read what it's for before you drop it.
Escape cancels an armed transition.
Titles
Add title puts a text card on the timeline. Titles behave like clips — trim them, move them, and give them transitions.
Keyframes
Three properties can be keyframed over time: opacity, scale, and volume.
Click the keyframe button on the lane to add one at the playhead; click again to remove it. Clear removes every keyframe on that lane.
Two keyframes at different values make a change over time — that's how you fade a clip, push in slowly, or duck audio under a voiceover.
Speed
Clips can be sped up or slowed down. Slowing a clip is the standard move for showing a read develop or a block spring.
Bear in mind slow motion is only as smooth as the source frame rate. Footage shot at 60fps slows better than 30.
Tracks
Each track has lock and mute.
Lock prevents any edits on that track — worth setting on a track you've finished so a stray drag can't disturb it.
Mute silences the track without deleting anything.
Voiceover
Record VO records narration straight onto the timeline while the video plays. Use the volume keyframes to duck the clip's own audio underneath it.
Grabbing a still
Grab frame saves the current frame as a PNG. Useful for a thumbnail source or a diagram still.
Sending back to the Chalkboard
Two routes, and the difference matters.
Send back to Chalkboard is instant. It copies the cut directly without re-encoding, so a long clip returns in about a second.
The trade-off: it can only cut on the clip's existing keyframes, so the start of your cut may land a beat away from your mark. Fine for trimming dead air before a snap.
Send back (exact) re-renders the range. Frame-accurate, and it handles multi-clip ranges, transitions and speed changes — but it takes roughly as long as the clip runs.
Rule of thumb: trimming one clip, use the instant route. Anything assembled from multiple clips or with effects on it, use exact.
How precisely the instant route can cut depends on how the footage was encoded. Clips recorded in the app cut cleanly; footage from elsewhere may cut less precisely.
Exporting
Export MP4 renders frame by frame to H.264. No dropped frames, ready for YouTube.
Export WebM produces a true 30fps VP9/Opus file, also YouTube-ready.
Both are offline renders — the app builds the file frame by frame rather than capturing playback, so nothing is dropped if your machine stutters.
Project shape sets the aspect ratio, and the preview and every export follow it. Set this before you start rather than after.
Frame rate — 30 is the usual choice. 60 doubles the render time.
S / M / L set the export resolution.
Interface
Match the Chalkboard theme keeps Cut Room in step with whatever theme you've chosen in the main app.
Clear empties the timeline and starts again.
Worth knowing
Voice commands don't work in Cut Room. The microphone and the command vocabulary live in the Chalkboard. Once you're in Cut Room, everything is mouse and keyboard.
Cut Room is its own window. You can leave it open on a second monitor while you keep working in the Chalkboard.
Ripple and roll behave differently than they look. If a trim isn't doing what you expect, check which tool is active — most confusion with a timeline editor comes from being in the wrong mode rather than the edit being wrong.