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Cut Silence and Dead Footage

Three tools in the Clip menu sweep the dead weight out of your selected clips: Delete Silence… removes the quiet stretches, Delete Non-motion… removes the stretches where nothing moves on screen, and Delete Non-looking… removes the stretches where nobody is looking at the camera. They share one dialog design, so this page covers the shared parts once, then each tool's own controls.

Each tool needs its data ready first. Delete Silence listens to the audio of the selected clips. Delete Non-motion needs Detect Motion to have run on the footage. Delete Non-looking needs Face Tracking.

Cut with any of the three​

  1. Select the clips on the timeline.
  2. Open the Clip menu and click the tool. A greyed entry explains itself on hover, for example Track is locked — unlock to run Delete Silence.
  3. Adjust the dialog's sliders and watch the timeline. The regions that would go are painted live: red when the action is Delete, amber when it's Disable.
  4. On the Action row, choose Disable or Delete. Delete is the default.
  5. Click the confirm button, Delete (red) or Disable.

The dialog is a small floating panel, so the timeline stays visible while you tune it. When it finishes, a notification counts the result, for example Deleted 8 silent regions from 3 clips. One press of Ctrl+Z undoes the whole pass.

Delete really deletes. The regions are removed from the timeline. Disable is the safer path: the regions are split off and turned off in place, so nothing is lost and you can turn pieces back on or sweep them out later. See Cut and Delete.

Linked clips and Ripple Delete​

When your selected clips have linked partners, a Delete linked clips checkbox appears (it reads Disable linked clips in Disable mode). It starts unchecked, so by default only the selected side is cut. If a linked partner sits on a locked track, a note tells you it will stay untouched until you unlock that track.

In Delete mode there's also a Ripple Delete checkbox, off by default. Leave it off and the deletes leave gaps behind. Turn it on and later clips slide left to close the gaps. It's greyed out unless linked clips are included, because rippling only one track would push it out of sync with its untouched linked clips. The plain delete and Disable stay available either way.

info

A planned cut that can't be made cleanly is skipped and marked on the timeline with the amber Cut skipped: no clean splice point marker. The result count already leaves the skips out. See check for skipped cuts.

Delete Silence​

Clip → Delete Silence… finds the quiet stretches in the selected clips' audio. Four sliders shape the result. Move them and watch the preview:

  • Noise Floor Offset (in dB) shifts the loudness line the tool treats as silence.
  • Head Pad and Tail Pad (in frames) keep a little room at each end of a cut.
  • Minimum to Delete (in frames) sets how long a quiet stretch must be before it's cut at all.

Below the sliders sits the checkbox Also delete regions with no transcribed speech, off by default. Turning it on also removes stretches where the transcript has no words, so a pause next to an untranscribed mumble becomes one clean cut. Two notes can appear with it:

  • 3 selected sources have no transcript — only detected silence will be removed from them.
  • 2 clips have no transcribed speech — the entire clip will be deleted. Take that one seriously before confirming.

If nothing matches your settings, the dialog says No silent regions at these settings.

Delete Non-motion​

Clip → Delete Non-motion… cuts the stretches where the picture holds still, which is most useful on screen recordings. It works on selected video clips, and every source needs a Detect Motion run first. A source without one is listed with not analyzed — run Detect Motion first.

Its sliders:

  • Motion Threshold (in %) sets how much movement counts as motion.
  • Minimum Gap (in frames) sets how long a still stretch must be before it's cut.
  • Head Pad and Tail Pad (in frames) keep a little room at each end of a cut.

The gap and pad sliders start at values suggested by the motion analysis. If nothing matches, the dialog says No still regions at these settings.

Delete Non-looking​

Clip → Delete Non-looking… cuts the stretches where the person you care about isn't looking at the camera. It works on selected video clips with face-tracking data.

The Who counts as on camera section decides whose gaze matters. Everyone is on by default, next to one card per detected person showing their face, their name (or Unnamed), and how much of the video they're on screen. The line under the picker spells out the rule: with several people counted, sections where none of them are looking at the camera are removed, and sections where nobody is on screen at all count as non-looking too. Pick exactly one person and it tightens to just them, including the sections where they're off screen entirely.

The Sensitivity slider runs 1 to 5, default 3, with More cuts at the low end and Fewer cuts at the high end. If nothing matches, the dialog says No non-looking regions at this sensitivity.

If some of the selected footage was never face-tracked, a warning tells you how many seconds won't be classified or deleted, and a Process Missing button in the footer starts face tracking on just those ranges. Its notification asks you to re-open the dialog when that finishes.