Find and Review Retakes
How to find the places where a speaker repeated a line, then listen through the attempts and pick the take to keep.
Retakes finds spots where the speaker said the same thing more than once and groups those attempts together as numbered takes. The results land on the transcript, where each group shows up as colored, numbered badges on the sentence pills. The Retake review panel then lets you audition every take and choose the winner.
Before you run it
Retakes needs a transcript. Without one, the Retakes… entry in the Process menu is greyed out with the reason Requires transcripts. Run Transcribe first. See Transcribe Your Footage.
Retakes works on the audio tracks of your timeline, not on the media bin selection. Put the footage you want scanned on the timeline first.
Run Retakes
- Open the Process menu and click Retakes….
- In the Tracks list, check the audio tracks to scan. Each row shows the track name and a count like 3 clips · 2 transcribed. Tracks with nothing transcribed are greyed out. If only one track has transcribed media, it starts checked.
- Pick an action from the Action dropdown. Leave it on Mark bad takes only for your first run. The next section explains the choices.
- Set the Sensitivity slider if you like. It runs from 1 to 7 and defaults to 4. Lower values only catch near-identical repeats. Higher values also catch loosely reworded repeats, and the run takes longer.
- Check the summary line at the bottom, for example Will process 4 media files, then click Run.
Progress and cancelling work the same as every other tool. See Run an AI Tool.
Choose an action
The Action dropdown decides what happens to the timeline when the run finishes:
- Mark bad takes only (the default) changes nothing on the timeline. The run just marks the retake groups on the transcript so you can review them yourself.
- Lift bad takes keeps the last take of each group and deletes the ranges of the earlier attempts, leaving gaps behind.
- Ripple delete bad takes does the same but closes the gaps, so everything after each cut shifts left.
Start with Mark bad takes only. It is non-destructive, and it feeds the Retake review panel, where you listen to each take before anything is removed. The other two actions trust the tool's default pick, which is always the last take in each group.
Open the Retake Review panel
Open it from View → Retake review, or right-click a retake sentence pill on the timeline and choose Open in Retake review to land directly on that group. If no media in the project has retake groups yet, a small dialog says No retake groups found — run the Retakes process on a media file first.
The panel floats over the editor, so you can keep working on the timeline. Drag it by its header, resize it from the corner, and it remembers its size and position. If more than one media file has retake groups, a dropdown in the header switches between them.
Audition the takes
The panel lists one card per retake group, lettered A, B, C in script order. A collapsed card shows the take's text with the words that differ from the last take highlighted, a timecode button that jumps the playhead to that spot on the timeline, and one numbered pip per take. Click a card to expand it.
Inside, each attempt gets its own row: Take 1, Take 2, and so on, each with a play button, a small waveform, its duration, and its text. Words that differ from the last take are highlighted. A take that matches it word for word shows a same words chip instead.
Cut-off attempts carry a false start tag. They are probably junk, but you can still keep one if the labelling got it wrong.
The Auto-play toggle in the stats bar is on by default. When a group opens, it loops that group's takes in order, skipping false starts, until you keep one. It never moves to the next group on its own. Each group you've listened to gets a check mark, and the footer bar tracks how many groups you've heard.
Pick the take to keep
Click a take's row to keep it. That is the whole gesture, there is no separate accept or reject button. Keeping a take:
- Disables the losing takes on the timeline. They are dimmed, not deleted, and it is a single undo step. See Cut and Delete for what a disabled clip means.
- Collapses the group and opens the next one, so you can move straight on.
- Saves your pick with the project, so it survives closing the panel and reopening the project later.
Before you pick anything, the kept take in every group is the last one. A group where you chose differently shows a changed tag. Use the card's Reset button to put one group back to its last take, or Reset all in the stats bar for every changed group. Ctrl+Z inside the panel undoes your last pick.
You can keep a take without opening the panel. Right-click its sentence pill on the timeline and choose Select as best take.
Keyboard shortcuts
The ? button in the panel header shows the same list:
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
| ↑ ↓ | Move between groups |
| ← → | Hear the previous / next take |
| 1 … 9 | Hear that take |
| Space | Play / stop the current take |
| Enter | Keep this take, open next group |
| Ctrl Z | Undo a pick |
| Esc | Close the panel |
The shortcuts only work while the panel has focus and a group is open.
Remove unused takes
The losing takes stay on the timeline, disabled, until you clear them out. When you're done reviewing, click Remove unused takes in the panel's footer. A confirm dialog states exactly what will happen, for example Permanently delete 12 unused takes across 5 groups and close the gaps. Click Remove to go through with it.
This one deletes for real, unlike picking takes. If there is nothing to remove, a message says No unused takes to remove. If any affected track is locked, a message names the track to unlock first.