Silences, ums and restarts

A recording of me talking is maybe half talking. The rest is me thinking, with my mouth closed or with my mouth open, saying um. Then I say the sentence three times because the first two were bad. In a waveform all of that looks like talking. In the words it’s obvious: Splicer drops the silences and the ums for you and marks the rest, so you deal with it in a few keys instead of an evening of scrubbing. And nothing is gone for good.

Silences and ums come in dropped

Open a video and the quiet stretches are already dropped, and so is every um and uh. The pauses and the stalling never reach the cut, before you press anything.

That’s all Splicer drops on its own. Each silence is a clip on the rail, born dropped, so and walk over them like any other. The ums and uhs are cut out of the clips they sit in, like any word you trim away. Both come back the way the last section of this guide shows.

Pick the take that worked

Repeats and restarts are only marked. Splicer never chooses between your takes; that’s your job, and it’s a quick one when they sit next to each other with a mark on them.

Step through them on the rail. drops the takes that sucked, keeps the one that didn’t. A restart is marked the same way, so you see it before you keep it.

Bring anything back

Nothing is gone for good. Ctrl+Z undoes the last thing you did, as many times as you need, and Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes it. On a Mac, Cmd works for Ctrl on the desk.

A dropped clip can also be kept again on its own: step to it and press . That goes for a clip you dropped and for a silence Splicer dropped; a silence comes back only this way, since you never dropped it. An um is a cut word, so it comes back like one: move the clip’s edge back over it with the trim keys from the first-cut guide, or undo. Sometimes the um was the joke.

Next, finding the one sentence you remember saying, somewhere in there.