Cutting out the silence

Every unscripted recording is a third pauses. Removing them is the fastest way to make a video shorter and better at the same time.

With nothing selected, the Motion tab has SILENCE.

How it finds them

It listens to how loud the audio is. There is no speech recognition involved, nothing is uploaded, and it works in any language, including one with no speech in it at all.

Press the button and it measures the audio, then shows what it found.

The three settings

Threshold is how quiet counts as silent. Raise it if it is missing obvious pauses, lower it if it is cutting into your words.

Shortest silence is how long a quiet stretch has to be before it is worth cutting. Set this too low and the video is chopped into breaths.

Ignore short sounds exists because a mouse click or a key tap is a very short sound sitting in the middle of a pause. Anything shorter than this is treated as part of the silence rather than as a reason to keep it.

Choosing what goes

Each stretch it found is a chip on the timeline ruler. Click a chip to drop that one from the list, and it stays in the video.

This is the part worth doing properly. A pause before an important sentence is doing work, and cutting every single gap gives you a video where nobody breathes. Keep the ones that were deliberate.

Remove all cuts the lot, and tells you how many and how many seconds before it does anything.

What it cuts

Every track at once, and the picture with them. The video closes up, the captions move with their words, and everything downstream stays lined up.

If one track seems untouched, check whether it is locked. Locked tracks are skipped.