CutCatalog reads your Final Cut Pro libraries once, while the drive is connected. After that you can search any project you have ever cut and see the library and the drive it lives on, with the drive sitting unplugged on a shelf.
Mac app · macOS 15 or later · free during the beta · scanning never writes to a drive
CutCatalog · v0.1
These are the numbers from one pass over a ThunderBay enclosure holding four years of archived work. Nothing on the drive was written to.
Final Cut searches the library you have open. CutCatalog searches all of them at once, including the ones on drives in a drawer. A result gives you the project, its event, its library and the drive to go and plug in. Copies of the same library are grouped together rather than one being picked silently, so when a project exists on both your drive and someone else's, you can see which copy is newer.
Final Cut renders ahead of time for smooth playback, then keeps the results forever. In one archived month that was 414 GB of a 433 GB library. CutCatalog lists every library by render size, you pick the finished ones, and their render files move to the Trash. Original media, optimized and proxy media, and the project databases are never touched.
Final Cut names its automatic backups after the minute it made them, which tells you nothing. CutCatalog spots the pattern and files each backup under the library it belongs to, with its save time. Choose how many of the newest to keep, and the rest go to the Trash. A group of backups whose library is nowhere in your catalog gets flagged instead, because it may be the only copy left.
Point CutCatalog at a working folder and an archive folder. It shows what is new, what is shared, what differs and what is stored twice, then copies what is missing. Every file is checksummed, flushed to the drive, read back from the drive itself rather than from memory, and checked again. A copy only takes its real name once it has passed, so an interrupted copy never looks finished.
CutCatalog has been built and tested against one editor's drives. What it needs now is other people's mess: different drive counts, different enclosures, libraries going back further than mine.
Join the beta in TestFlight and the build is yours straight away, with no invite to wait for. Open that link on the Mac you edit on. If you want to tell me what you are working with, email support@rivotlabs.com with roughly how many drives you have, what you use today to find an old project (Finder, a catalog app, a script, or nothing), and whether you are on a NAS or a RAID. The beta is free and the build is sandboxed, so CutCatalog only reads the drives you point it at. It is a one-person studio, so expect a reply from a person rather than a form.
Yes, that is the whole point of it. You scan a drive once while it is connected and CutCatalog reads the libraries on it and saves what it found. After that you can search any time. A result names the project, its event, its library and the drive the library is on, whether or not that drive is plugged in.
Scanning never writes to a library or a drive. Final Cut's databases are opened in SQLite's read-only, immutable mode, so there are no writes, no locks and no journal files. The only things CutCatalog moves are the ones you select and confirm: render files, older automatic backups, and duplicate copies found by Compare Folders. Those go to the Trash on their own drive, never a straight delete.
It has been checked against 60 real libraries spanning Final Cut Pro 10.7.1 through 12.4, which is nine library formats. Archived libraries keep whatever format they were last opened in, so an old library reads fine without being updated first. If Final Cut ships a format CutCatalog has not verified, that library is still catalogued at library level with a warning rather than being read as though nothing changed.
Not for scanning or searching, which are read-only. Final Cut must be closed before anything moves to the Trash, and before a library is copied, so a library is never copied half-saved. CutCatalog checks again right before each step and stops if Final Cut opens.
Yes. Network shares are identified by their server and share name, so a share is recognised as the same place next time it is mounted. Scanning tries Spotlight first and falls back to walking the drive, which is what makes shares without a Spotlight index work. Trash-based cleanup is local-drive only, since network shares have no Trash.
Not decided yet, and the beta is free. Rivot Labs does not sell ads or run subscriptions that quietly renew, so expect a one-time purchase with a free tier when it ships.
Open the TestFlight link on the Mac you edit on, install Apple's TestFlight app if you do not have it yet, and CutCatalog installs from there. It is free and there is no invite to wait for. Testers on a NAS or a RAID enclosure are especially useful, so email support@rivotlabs.com if that is you.