The Actual Problem
The stated symptom is “chaos” — footage scattered across drives, too many takes to review, and long recordings that never become short ones. That reads as three tooling gaps. It is not. It is one sequencing problem wearing three costumes.
You cannot cull what you cannot see. You cannot repurpose what you have not culled. Buying all three layers at once means paying for two tools you cannot yet use, and evaluating none of them properly.
The Three Lanes
The Stack
| Tool | Lane | Platform | Cost | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peakto | Cataloging | Mac only | ~$10/mo · Pro $25/mo | Buy first |
| Adobe Bridge | Cataloging | Mac + Win | Free | Fallback |
| DaVinci Resolve | Cataloging | Mac + Win | Free tier | Not your NLE |
| NeoFinder | Cataloging | Mac | One-time | Archive only |
| Selects | Culling | Pre-NLE | Unverified | Phase 2 |
| OpusClip | Repurposing | Web | Unverified | Only if publishing |
Why Peakto wins the first slot: it is the only option matching the exact shape of the problem — Mac, footage spread across drives, and both Premiere and Final Cut in play. It centralizes projects from Premiere Pro, Final Cut, and Resolve into one interface, auto-tags, and finds scenes by description, image, or dialogue. All analysis runs locally on the machine; nothing goes to the cloud. The Pro tier adds a video panel for sub-clips, markers, and exportable bins, plus a Premiere plugin.
What Has Not Been Verified
Final Cut bin export. Peakto’s Pro-tier bins are described as ready for “Premiere Pro and more.” That phrase is doing unearned work. Confirm Final Cut specifically during the trial before paying the Pro premium.
Selects pricing and handoff. Current cost and Final Cut compatibility both unconfirmed. Do not commit until Lane 1 is standing and the tool can be evaluated against a real, indexed library.
OpusClip pricing. Unconfirmed. Irrelevant until a publishing cadence exists.
The Sequence
| Step | Action | Gate To Clear |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peakto free trial, Standard tier. Index every drive. | Can you find a clip by description in under 30 seconds? |
| 2 | Decide Standard vs Pro after testing Final Cut bin export. | Do the sub-clip bins actually land in your NLE? |
| 3 | Run one month. Do not buy anything else. | Is the catalog still current, or did it rot? |
| 4 | Only then evaluate a culling layer against the indexed library. | Is take-selection still the bottleneck? |
| 5 | Repurposing last, and only with a publishing cadence in hand. | Are you actually shipping to an audience? |
The RichOS Move
Every other domain has an @ folder and a routing rule. Video does not. That is why the footage piles up — it has no home, so it accumulates in whatever folder it landed in.
Peakto is the closet. It does not decide what belongs where. A bench skill does: point it at an ingest folder, transcribe, tag by domain, file into the right @ folder, and log what moved. Build it with util-skill-new after the catalog is standing — a routing skill with nothing to route is infrastructure for its own sake.