[Updated May 4, 2026, with information on their speech-to-text model, and again June 4 with info on transcription models.]
Recently, James Seddon, CEO of Rock Stars Unlimited Ltd, emailed me about a new utility he’s created called Sequence for Final Cut Pro 12. As I looked at its website, I realized that this was a tool that many editors would find useful, so I emailed James to learn more. (Website: https://sequencetool.com/ )
Larry: What is Sequence?
James Seddon, CEO
James: Sequence is a native macOS app that helps editors turn their footage into cleaner, faster-cut timelines for Final Cut Pro. It combines on-device transcription, text-based editing, audio cleanup (profanity filtering and filler word removal), globally indexed search across your entire imported catalog, and finally the hand-off to Final Cut Pro, where the editor drives the creative storytelling.
Larry: Why did you create it?
James: I started by solving it for myself. After years of editing client projects, I kept noticing the same pattern: most of the time wasn’t spent on creative decisions. It was spent removing filler words, cleaning up audio, adding captions, hunting for the right clip from archives. I wrote scripts to handle it, which proved the workflow worked and sped up my output, then built Sequence so any editor could have the same thing.
The current wave of AI editing tools worried me too. Most are cloud-based, which means they fall over the moment you hand them 8K ProRes footage, and they make creative decisions that should belong to the editor. Sequence does the repetitive work and hands control back. The story is still yours to tell.
Larry: What type of projects will find Sequence most useful?
James: The immediate answer is high-frequency content: YouTube channels, social media creators, anyone turning around multiple videos a week. The time savings compound quickly.
Podcasts are the second big use case. The format is growing fast and the editing workload is brutal. Getting a clean hour of audio with filler words and profanity handled is genuinely tedious work. Sequence tackles that. Multi-track and multi-cam podcast support is coming.
Larry: How does it work?
James: Import your media: video or audio. If the file isn’t natively compatible with Final Cut Pro, Sequence converts it automatically, prioritizing a lossless remux first so you keep full quality. From there, it transcribes everything on-device.
Then you edit the transcript. Disable words, reorder sentences, clean up phrasing – the playback panel reflects your changes near-instantly so you can move fast and listen back once you’re ready.
Each project supports multiple variants, so you can explore alternate cuts by removing filler words to keep the timeline tight or different censorship choices such as redacting profanity with a BEEP! (separate audio track in FCP with tasteful fade to soften the bite).
Then normalize the audio to your loudness target, and export a Final Cut Pro package with all those editorial decisions intact, as soft-edits, so everything is still adjustable inside FCP.
Larry: Is this just another AI tool looking for ways to replace an editor?
James: No. Sequence is built to remove repetitive work and give editors a place to organize their media, not to take away their creative spark. The transcription runs on-device using a model tuned to clearly detect speech, but every editorial decision, what stays, what goes, how the story lands, remains with the editor. Sequence just makes the process faster to get to the real creative part.
Larry: What are variants and how do they help?
James: Variants are alternate cuts of the same project. Think of them as tabs: each one shares the same source media but can have completely different editorial decisions; different filler word handling, different sections removed, different censorship choices, and different audio normalization targets. You can start a new variant as a blank slate or copy your existing edits as a starting point.
They’re particularly useful when a client needs a family-friendly version, or when you want to try a tighter cut (no filler fluff) without losing your original, then export the ones you want into Final Cut Pro to apply your creative touch and polish.
Larry: Your website talks about editing using the transcript. Is this text-based editing?
James: Yes. The transcript panel is the editorial timeline. If you reorder a sentence, that section of the original media moves with it. If you disable a word or phrase, it’s soft-cut from the output. You never have to scrub through footage to make those decisions. You read, edit, and listen back.
Every change syncs to the playback panel near-instantly, so you can make a full pass of text edits and then do a single listen-through to check the flow before you export.
Larry: How much of Sequence is cloud-based?
James: Almost none. The only time Sequence touches the internet is to validate your license, and to fetch the transcription model on first install. That’s it. Your project data and transcription run entirely on your Mac, keeping everything private and fast.
For editors working with confidential client material, this is crucial. It has been a core design decision from day one.
Larry: How is Sequence priced?
James: Sequence includes a 5-day free trial so you can try it out before committing. After that, it’s a one-time fee of $130 (£100). No subscription, no recurring charges, licensed for up to two Macs, and updates are included for life.
Checkout is handled securely through Stripe.
Larry: How do you remove ums and long pauses and still maintain sync?
James: Sequence works with time-range based editing against each word, so sync is preserved through explicit timeline construction rather than destructive waveform editing. Every word in the transcript has a precise start and end time; remove it, and the timeline is rebuilt cleanly around that gap.
Filler word and profanity handling are available per variant right now: skip, silence, or beep. Silence removal is already in the works and is currently in testing, so it’s coming soon.
Larry: When a project is sent to FCP, what audio are you sending?
James: If you haven’t used normalization, Sequence passes through the original untouched audio from your media. If you have, we extract the raw audio and apply your loudness preferences to it. So if your source is a PCM 24-bit 48kHz recording, that’s exactly what comes out, just with your LUFS and true peak targets applied.
On export, the Final Cut Pro package includes the normalized audio as a dedicated track alongside the video, with the main video audio muted so FCP defaults to the normalized version. Nothing is destructive. Editors can use what Sequence produced, swap it out, take it further in a DAW, or bring it back into Sequence as an external audio source. Your call.
Larry: What question have I failed to ask?
James: Search. Finding a specific moment across hundreds of hours of accumulated footage is still genuinely painful. Final Cut Pro 12 introduced transcript search, but it’s scoped to one open library at a time.
Sequence indexes every word of every transcript locally on your Mac across your entire imported catalog, before anything goes near a Final Cut Pro library. Large YouTube operations use this exact feature in cloud-based tools to rapidly surface archive clips when a topic is trending, spinning up Shorts and repurposed content fast. Sequence gives you the same capability, entirely on your Mac, with near-instant results regardless of how large your catalog grows.
Larry: Write a one-paragraph commercial for Sequence.
James: Sequence is the fastest way to turn spoken-word footage into a clean Final Cut timeline. Import your media, transcribe on-device, edit by text, remove the filler, handle the profanity, normalize the audio, and export a ready-to-finish Final Cut Pro package. No cloud. No subscription. No AI making creative decisions for you. Just a faster path to the creative part.
Larry: James, thank you for your time! Again, the website is https://sequencetool.com/
James: Thank you Larry, really appreciate the thoughtful questions. I’m looking forward to your readers trying Sequence out and hearing what they want to see next. Please do reach out with your requests!
UPDATE – May 4, 2026
As you will read in the comments, Dirk asked what model Sequence uses for speech-to-text conversion. I emailed James Seddon to find out. He replied:
It’s NVIDIA’s latest Parakeet v3, which I’ve converted to Core ML to utilize Apple’s hardware efficiently whilst retaining the performance of NVIDIA’s NeMo runtime.
We did cover the model briefly in a recent blog post, but it would be great to have it featured in your article – https://sqtool.link/coreml
I found the blog post fascinating and, while technical, it is also understandable. A rare feat.
UPDATE – June 4, 2026
In the comments below, Shane complained he wasn’t able to access the free trial. And another reader asked about which transcription models they were using. So, I contacted James Seddon (CEO) for answers. Here’s what he wrote.
Free trial issue
Really sorry to hear one of your readers hit a wall getting started. So since you emailed, I’ve been strengthening that part. Version 1.2.2 (the latest) includes reliability improvements to the trial onboarding flow (many users have already been through the trial successfully so it’s edge cases).
Further backend updates are going out this evening that should resolve the remaining friction for users who’ve been hitting this. So, tomorrow, it should be a much smoother experience.
Make sure users are on version 1.2.2, open the app, login and activate the trial from the app (no card needed). If they’re still stuck after tonight’s update, feel free to send them my way directly via the https://sequencetool.com/support
Transcription engine
Sequence uses a custom-built integration and tuning harness, this isn’t an off-the-shelf Whisper/Parakeet wrapper or a pass-through to a cloud service. We’ve invested heavily in building our own layer that lets us squeeze significantly better accuracy and performance out of the on-device models than most tools achieve with similar engines. So far we’ve consistently outperformed most transcription engines available.
We don’t support third-party engines like MacWhisper by design, we only ship what we’ve tested and tuned ourselves, so we can stand behind the quality. I’d genuinely encourage your reader to put it through its paces and compare for themselves.
Here are three links that might be useful to share:
Thanks again, Larry, hope that helps!
7 Responses to Sequence: A New “Pre-Edit Tool” for Final Cut Pro
This looks like a really useful tool – it would be good to see a video demonstration ! Great to see 0ne-time purchase.
My question is what engine Sequence is actually using for transcription. And / or if they implement other engines, such as MacWhisper, into their software. I’m asking because a transcription is not always a good transcription for asked for example, MacWhisper has yielded significantly better – and therefore more useable – results than any of the in-line tools by Adobe or even BlackMagic are providing.
Dirk:
Good question, which I didn’t think to ask. I’ll email James to see if they have announced what model they are using. If so, I’ll update this article.
[ A bit later ] Dirk, James got back to me with answers, so I updated the article.
Larry
This is a practical tool that can help editors, especially when you constantly work on daily deadlines. Screening interviews to select SOTs for a news script is time-consuming. That’s why camera operators and/or reporters use time-of-day time code to select SOTs when attending press conferences. The sausage factory waits for no one.
The big question is why Final Cut Pro does not have built-in text-based editing. I have read that it already exists somewhere within the ones and zeros, and Apple does not activate the feature.
This function could be very useful for ENG, a large segment of the video production world that Apple seems to have no interest in selling to.
Why, Apple? Any idea, Mr. Jordan?
Caesar:
Sigh… As I wrote in my newsletter today: “Apple, though, seems to have given up. They haven’t released any significant new features in months, while Creator Studio feels like a marketing pitch to attract new users. Does anyone at Apple really care about creating video anymore?”
Apple doesn’t share its future plans. But, if we can use history to project a trend, Apple is supporting FCP, but not very active in moving it forward.
Larry
Thank you.
The Creator Studio subscription model is hard to swallow. Thankfully, editors can still opt to pay for an FCP license as a one-time charge.
I can understand that maintaining secrecy regarding hardware development for products such as iPhone and iPad is important in such a competitive tech environment.
Not so much for FCP. They need better commitment and communication.
Incidentally, FCP for iPad is very good for most basic ENG packages. Unfortunately it’s available only via subscription. Otherwise, I would have bought an iPad which enables great mobility.
To bad I can’t try it, it just would not let me load the free trail, kept wanting me to pay.