MediaFlowSwift

How to Review Footage and Pick Your Selects on a Mac

Open Rapid Review (Workflow → Review, or Cmd+Opt+R) and go through your footage by keyboard: J/K/L to shuttle, 1–5 to rate, F to favorite, X to reject, C to mark a circle take. Each clip ends up with a star rating and, if you want it, a Reject tag or circle take set from Review — plus a Hero or Maybe tag you set from outside it — all of which you can filter and sort by afterward.

That’s the whole workflow. The rest of this page is what each key does, and how to get your best takes to the top of the pile before you start.

What Rapid Review is for

Rapid Review is a focused review sheet for evaluating clips quickly. Use the keyboard to play, rate, favorite, reject and move through your footage without touching the mouse.

Press ? at any time for an on-screen list of the keys. The ones you’ll use most:

With auto-advance on (the default — press T to toggle it), rating a clip, favoriting it, rejecting it, or pressing A or R moves you to the next clip after a short delay. Taking a favorite or Reject back off, clearing a rating, or pressing C keeps you on the clip instead, so a double-tap doesn’t skip you past one you’re still deciding on.

Hero, Maybe, Reject

A star rating and a select status are two different things, and you can set either, both, or neither on a clip. The select status sorts clips three ways:

  • Hero (green) — Best takes, definitely using these
  • Maybe (orange) — Worth reviewing again, possible B-roll
  • Reject (red) — Definitely not using. Stored as “Kill”, which is what it used to be called

Set it with Cmd+Shift+H / M / K. Maybe has no Review key; inside Review, X toggles Reject and C toggles circle take instead. Once set, the Table view’s Select column sorts by it, the toolbar’s filter menu can show just your Heroes or just your Rejects, and the sidebar’s Smart Groups has Reject candidates (clips marked with R) and Unreviewed (clips with an import proposal nobody has confirmed).

Narrow the queue before you open Review

Rapid Review works through whatever the main window’s current filter shows — so set that filter first, rather than reviewing everything in import order:

For the fastest selects workflow: click the Review segment of the pipeline strip to show only unrated clips, open Review, and use 1–5 to rate each clip.

Filtering by category, scene or camera first turns one long review session into several short, focused ones — all of today’s interview clips, then all of the drone shots, instead of switching context every few clips.

Let Smart Selects go first

Smart Selects scores every clip before you look at it, so you can review in quality order instead of import order:

Smart Selects, once called AI Smart Selects, scores every clip on five measures and suggests a star rating. It runs on this Mac and needs no internet connection.

It weighs sharpness, exposure, audio, a rough stability guess and composition, then sorts the results by overall quality score. You accept ratings individually or click Accept All — nothing is set until you do.

The one case worth knowing about:

Sharpness analysis samples a single frame near the start of each clip. Clips that start out of focus but later become sharp may receive a lower sharpness score than expected.

So a clip that racks focus in its first second can score lower than it deserves — worth a second look before you trust the number over your own eyes, especially for anything near your cutoff.

Smart Selects also proposes circle takes on its own:

A clip that scores above 85% overall is proposed as a Circle Take. Nothing changes until you Accept that clip or click Accept All. Accepting a Circle Take also marks the clip Hero with five stars.

Run it, accept what looks right, then open Rapid Review on what’s left to make the calls a score can’t.

Everything here can be undone

Category, rating and select-status changes — including ones made with the Rapid Review shortcuts — go through Edit → Undo (Cmd+Z), named for the step: “Undo Rate ★4 on 12 Clips”, for instance. Clear a rating with Cmd+0 or Edit → Set Rating → Clear Rating, and a status with Edit → Select → Clear Status, on as many selected clips as you like.

Read more

All guides — the full list.

Try it on your own footage

MediaFlowSwift is the Mac app this guide describes. Download it and the full app runs for 14 days, with no card asked for — macOS 14 or later, on a Mac with Apple silicon.