Your first cut

This is the whole job on one recording, start to finish: open it, keep what was worth saying, put it in order, watch it, export it. Most of it is two arrow keys. I’ll write Ctrl throughout; on a Mac, Cmd works on the desk wherever I do. The terminal workspace stays on Ctrl.

Open a video

Drop a video on the desk, or press Ctrl+O, or from a terminal:

splicer open <file>

One video at a time. The first frame shows in about a tenth of a second, and the filmstrip and the transcript start at once. The first clips are ready to keep within about a second, while the rest keeps filling in behind them. You don’t wait for Splicer; it waits for you.

Keep and drop

Each clip on the rail is a piece of the recording with its words on it. Look at the words, decide, press a key.

drops the clip and moves on. keeps it and moves on. and move along the rail when you want to go back or skip ahead.

The timeline at the bottom starts empty, and only the clips you keep land on it, in order. That’s the one idea to take from this guide. The timeline is the cut. Not the raw footage you then carve at for an afternoon. The cut, and nothing else.

Don’t agonize. A dropped clip can be kept again with , and Ctrl+Z undoes any edit.

Arrange the cut

When the order isn’t the order you want, press Tab. Now the keys work on the timeline instead of the rail.

and choose a seat. Nothing is chosen until you press one, and the first press picks seat 1 whichever way; until then, Shift and the arrows do nothing. Shift+ and Shift+ move the chosen clip along the timeline. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste it. Delete removes it. [ and ] move a seat’s start earlier and later, and { and } its end, one word at a time, up to 5 seconds from where the clip was heard, for the clip that began a hair too late or ran a hair too long. A trim stops at the neighboring kept clip unless you hold Alt. Ctrl+Z undoes and Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes.

Play it before you believe it

Space plays the clip in hand. Shift+Space plays the whole cut, end to end: the page rolls up and the kept clips play one after the other, as the viewer will see them. Esc stops it, and so does Shift+Space again.

This is how I check my work. Not by scrubbing, by watching the cut as a cut. If a clip doesn’t belong, drop it and play again.

Export

Ctrl+E opens the export sheet. For a first cut, the big Export button, or Enter, is all you need, and the file lands in ~/Videos/Splicer. The shape (original, wide or vertical), captions and the rest of the sheet have a guide of their own at /splicer/guides/export/.

Nothing to save

Your work is a Splice, and a Splice saves as you go. There is no save step to forget.

Next, the ums, the pauses and the three takes of the same sentence.