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End User License Agreement

One person, unlimited projects, two machines. Do not resell it and do not take it apart. GenLock and Shutter are yours to keep. BaseCut works while your subscription is live. Your footage stays yours.

Last updated: 2026-10-21

The rest of this page is the full agreement. It is between you and ColinMadeThis Multimedia, LLC, a Texas limited liability company trading as Arc Engine Tools("we", "us").

1. What you are getting

You are getting a license to use the software. You are not buying the software itself. We keep all intellectual property in it.

The license is per person. If a second person needs to use the plugin, that person needs a second license.

2. Two kinds of license, because there are two kinds of product

GenLock and Shutter - one-time purchase. Your license is perpetual. It does not expire. You keep the version you bought and every update within the same major version line, for as long as you like.

BaseCut - subscription. Your license lasts while your subscription is paid and current. If you cancel, it runs to the end of the period you have paid for and then stops. If a payment fails and the retry window closes, it stops.

BaseCut is a subscription because part of it is a service: the cut is built by a large model running on our servers, which costs us money every time you press AI Rough Cut. A one-time price cannot pay for that. The full terms of the subscription, including your credit allowance, are in the Terms of Service.

Shutter watermarks its output until you activate it.An unactivated Shutter renders a visible "UNLICENSED TRIAL" mark over the frame. Activating your license key removes it. BaseCut and GenLock do not watermark anything.

3. What you may do

  • Install and activate the plugin on two machines. This is meant to be a laptop and a desk machine.
  • Free a seat at any time by pressing Deactivate on your account page, then activate a different machine.
  • Use the plugin in unlimited commercial and personal projects. There is no per-project fee and no royalty.
  • Use the results in work you deliver to clients.
  • Keep a backup copy of the installer.

4. What you may not do

  • Share, sell, rent, sublicense or give away the software or your license key.
  • Reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except where the law says you may despite this clause.
  • Bundle the plugin into another product, unless we agree in writing.
  • Remove or change our name, our notices, or any watermark - including Shutter's unlicensed-trial mark.
  • Use the plugin to break Adobe's terms or any law.
  • Put material through BaseCut that you do not have the right to process.

5. License keys and activation

Your purchase includes a license key. It looks like ARC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX and it is in your receipt email and on your account page.

Activating contacts our own license servers at arcenginetools.com over HTTPS, and registers one of your two seats. What is sent is your license key, an identifier for that installation, and a label for the machine so you can tell your two seats apart. The identifier is made differently by each product, and the difference is worth stating:

  • BaseCut and GenLock send a random string that the plugin makes up the first time it runs. Nothing about your Mac is read: not the serial number, not the hostname, not the user name, not the network address. (BaseCut labels the seat with a fixed name; GenLock labels it with your Premiere version.)
  • Shutteris a native effect rather than a panel. It reads your computer's hardware ID (on a Mac, its hardware UUID; on Windows, its machine GUID) and turns it into a salted, one-way SHA-256 digest on your own machinebefore sending it. The raw hardware ID never leaves your computer. Shutter also sends your computer's name as the seat label.

The activation never sends your footage, your projects or your editing activity. What BaseCut sends when it builds a cut is a different thing, and the Privacy Policy lists it item by item.

Offline. After activation the plugin keeps working without the internet for a period and then asks to check in again. That period is 21 days for BaseCut, 30 days for GenLock and 7 days for Shutter. Note that BaseCut cannot build a cut offline at all whatever its license says, because the cut is built on our servers.

Network trouble is not a license failure. If we cannot be reached, the plugin keeps working for the rest of that period. It only stops early when our server gives an explicit answer that the license is not valid.

A key may be switched off if it is used beyond the seat limit, if the purchase is refunded, or if the charge is reversed.

If your key is taken or leaked through no fault of yours, email support@arcenginetools.com and we will replace it.

6. What BaseCut needs

BaseCut needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later), macOS 14 or newer, Adobe Premiere 25.6 or newer, and the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app, which is what installs the panel. There is no Intel version and no Windows version. Use the 14-day free trial to check it runs on your machine before you pay.

BaseCut installs a second piece of software, the BaseCut Engine, which runs in your menu bar and transcribes on your own machine. This agreement covers it too. Removing BaseCut means removing the Engine as well.

7. Third-party software

The plugins include open-source components. Each stays under its own license, and nothing in this agreement changes those licenses.

  • Swifter (BSD-style license) - the local web server inside the BaseCut Engine and the Mac GenLock Engine.
  • FluidAudio (Apache License 2.0), which itself includes fastcluster (BSD-style) and vbx (Apache License 2.0) - speech recognition and speaker labelling in the BaseCut Engine.
  • Parakeet TDT 0.6b v3, an NVIDIA speech model in a CoreML conversion by FluidInference, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 - the model the BaseCut Engine downloads on first run.
  • RAFT(BSD 3-Clause, © 2020 princeton-vl) - the optical-flow model inside Shutter. Shutter also ships its full notices file inside the plugin bundle, at Shutter.plugin/Contents/Resources/THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt.
  • ONNX Runtime (MIT License, © Microsoft) and DirectML(Microsoft Software License Terms) - run the optical-flow model in the Windows build of Shutter. The Windows installer puts the same notices file in Shutter's folder, at Shutter\THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt.
  • Adobe's Premiere plugin SDKheaders, under Adobe's SDK license terms.

Ask us at support@arcenginetools.com for the full license text of any of them and we will send it.

BaseCut's cut is produced by a third-party AI model run on Google Cloud.

8. Your work is yours

Your footage is yours. Your transcript is yours. The cut BaseCut produces is yours. We claim no rights in any of it and we do not use it to train any model.

9. What the software does not promise

BaseCut chooses soundbites using a machine-learning model. Models are wrong sometimes. BaseCut is a rough-cut assistant, not an editor. Watch what it builds before you deliver it.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the software is provided "as is" and we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not promise it is free of errors, or that it will work with every future version of Premiere.

10. Limit on what we owe

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability under this agreement is limited to what you paid for that plugin in the twelve months before the claim.

We are not liable for lost profit, missed deadlines, lost or damaged footage, lost project files, or any indirect or consequential loss.

Keep backups of your projects. BaseCut writes sequences and subclips into your Premiere project, and any software that writes to your project can go wrong.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

11. Refunds

The Refund Policy applies and forms part of this agreement. In short, GenLock, Shutter and the All 3 bundle can be refunded within 14 days; BaseCut on its own is covered by its 14-day free trial instead and its charges are not refunded. A refund switches your license key off.

12. Ending this license

This license ends automatically if you break it. It also ends for BaseCut when your subscription ends.

When it ends, stop using the software and delete your copy.

Sections 1, 8, 9, 10 and 13 continue after it ends.

13. Law

Texas law governs this agreement, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

14. Contact

support@arcenginetools.com