Your selects, then one click into DaVinci Resolve

Here is the short version. A DaVinci Resolve AI selects workflow means letting a tool watch your raw footage, mark the moments worth keeping, and hand those selects to Resolve as a timeline — so you skip the manual culling pass and start editing. Sisyphos does exactly this. It rates every clip, shows you why each one made the cut, and pushes the picks into your running Resolve Studio with one click. You review the selects first. Nothing gets built until you say so.

DaVinci Resolve AI selects workflow — are there any tools?

A DaVinci Resolve AI selects workflow uses a tool to cull raw footage down to its best moments, then delivers those selects to Resolve as an editable timeline. The manual version — scrubbing every clip, marking in and out points, dragging keepers into a bin — is the unpaid half of video editing. An AI selects tool does that first pass for you. Sisyphos is a local-first desktop app that watches your raw footage, finds the best moments, and explains every pick by what's on screen — motion, sound, beat, and framing. Nothing leaves your Mac. It then pushes the chosen clips into your running DaVinci Resolve Studio with one click, building the timeline at the correct timecode on your original files. Before that push, you see every pick, its reason, and every clip it dropped — so the selects are yours to approve, adjust, or veto, not a black box.

A few tools sit near this lane, but most cut by transcript in the cloud and hand you a finished result with no way to ask why. That works for talking-head footage and breaks on everything else — a sports surge, a first look, a drone pass with no words in it. Sisyphos judges by what’s on screen instead, which is why it can rate footage where nobody speaks.

How to get AI selects into DaVinci Resolve

The workflow has five steps, and you stay in charge through all of them.

1. Point Sisyphos at your footage. A card, a folder, a whole shoot. The files stay on your Mac.
2. It watches every frame. Sisyphos measures motion, sound, beat, sharpness, and framing on your machine, then rates each moment.
3. It ranks the selects and writes down why. Every pick gets a plain-language reason. Every clip it dropped gets one too.
4. You review and adjust. Keep, cut, or re-order before anything leaves the app.
5. One click into Resolve. Sisyphos builds the timeline in your running DaVinci Resolve Studio, linking your original files at the right timecode.

What used to be an evening of scrubbing becomes a review of a ranked list. That’s how you save time on the cull without handing over the final say.

Reviewing your selects before they hit the timeline

This is the part that separates a selects tool from an auto-editor. Every pick comes with a reason. Every reject, too.

Sisyphos keeps a ledger: each candidate clip, whether it made the cut, its rank, and — when it was dropped — the reason in plain words. A clip can fall out because it’s “too similar to a better take” or because there was “too little happening.” Those are causes an editor recognizes, not codes. Ask “why isn’t this moment in my cut?” and you get an answer, not a shrug.

In practice the ledger reads like a shot list with verdicts. One take sits at rank 1 as a keeper; a near-duplicate a few frames later is dropped as “too similar to a better take”; a slow stretch is dropped as “too little happening”; a clip with no strong second to trim toward is set aside too. You scan the rejects as fast as the keeps, because each one tells you what it was and why it lost. When a clip does make it and needs trimming, it’s trimmed toward its best second, never just cropped to the middle.

So before a single clip lands on the Resolve timeline, you have seen the reasoning and made the call. Approve the list as-is, change the order, or throw picks out and pull others in. The selects that reach Resolve are the ones you signed off on.

What actually lands in Resolve

DaVinci Resolve gets a one-click push — Sisyphos builds the timeline in your running Resolve Studio. Every clip links your original files at the correct timecode, never proxies. On another NLE? Sisyphos also exports standard FCPXML and EDL (CMX3600), so the selects travel to Premiere, Final Cut, or anything that reads them.

What lands is a rough cut you can open and change, not a locked export. The reasons ride along, so a week later you can still see why each clip earned its place.

And it repeats. Run it today. Run it next year. Same cut, to the frame. For client work, that means a selects pass you can reproduce instead of re-guess.

Local-first, and priced like a tool

It all runs on your Mac. The footage never leaves the machine — only a few still frames plus the measurements go to the AI judge, under your own key, at cents per clip with a hard cap. One license is €129 at launch, perpetual, with 12 months of updates. No subscription to renew, because it runs on your hardware.

Sisyphos is in development. The workflow above — AI selects on the record, one click into Resolve — is what it is being built to do. Join the waitlist and you hear it first when it ships.

You stay the editor.