Cut Silence and Dead Footage

Use the cleanup tools in the Clip menu to remove silence, still footage, or sections where nobody you care about is looking at the camera. Each tool previews its cuts on the timeline before you apply them.

Prepare the clips

Select the clips you want to clean up. Delete Silence… needs clips with audio. Delete Non-motion… needs Detect Motion results, and Delete Non-looking… needs Face Tracking results.

Unlock the tracks you want to change. If audio or video clips overlap within the same linked group, unlink one or process the clips separately.

Preview and apply cuts

1. Select the clips on the timeline.
2. Open the Clip menu and choose Delete Silence…, Delete Non-motion…, or Delete Non-looking….
3. Adjust the settings while you watch the timeline. Red regions will be deleted. Amber regions will be disabled.
4. Choose Delete or Disable under Action.
5. Review the linked clip, ripple, and audio fade choices if they appear.
6. Click Delete or Disable to apply the changes.

Delete is the default. It removes the marked regions from the timeline. Disable splits those regions into separate pieces and turns them off in place, so you can turn them back on later. See Cut and Delete.

If the selected clips have linked partners, Delete linked clips or Disable linked clips includes them in the same pass. This starts off. A linked partner on a locked track stays unchanged.

Ripple Delete closes the gaps left by deleted regions. It starts off. When linked clips are present, you must include them before you can use Ripple Delete. This keeps linked tracks in sync.

Add audio fades at cuts starts off. Turn it on to add a short fade where a cut lands in speech. Very short cuts without a clean splice point may be skipped and marked on the timeline. See check for skipped cuts.

Press Ctrl+Z once to undo the entire pass.

Delete silence

Delete Silence… finds quiet sections in the selected clips' audio.

• Noise floor offset moves the loudness cutoff used to identify silence.
• Head pad and Tail pad keep extra frames around each cut.
• Minimum to delete sets the shortest quiet section the tool can remove.

Also delete regions with no transcribed speech includes sections where the transcript contains no words. It starts off. A source without a transcript still uses detected silence only. If a clip has a transcript but no words in its selected range, the whole clip may be deleted or disabled. Check the preview carefully before applying this option.

Delete non-motion

Delete Non-motion… finds still sections in selected video clips. Run Detect Motion on every source first.

Footage outside the analyzed ranges stays unchanged. If a source file has changed, Solar Sailer ignores its old motion results and asks you to rerun Detect Motion. Do that before trying to remove its still sections.

• Motion threshold sets how much movement counts as motion.
• Minimum gap sets the shortest still section the tool can remove.
• Head pad and Tail pad keep extra frames around each cut.

Delete non-looking

Delete Non-looking… finds sections where the chosen people are not looking at the camera. It works only within footage covered by Face Tracking.

Under Who counts as on camera, Everyone is selected by default. You can choose one or more detected people instead. With several people selected, a section is removed only when none of them is looking. Sections with nobody on screen also count as non-looking. If you choose one person, sections where that person is off screen count too.

Sensitivity runs from 1 to 5 and starts at 3. Lower settings make more cuts. Higher settings make fewer cuts.

Footage without face-tracking coverage stays unchanged. Use Process missing to analyze the listed missing ranges, then reopen Delete Non-looking… to review the new preview.