Remove Umms and Filler Words

Umm Removal finds filler sounds like "um", "uh", "er", and "ah" in your recordings and cuts them out of the timeline, trimming the pause around each one. This page covers running it, tuning it, and applying the cuts.

The tool scans the transcript word by word, then measures the audio around each filler and decides whether it can be cut cleanly. It needs a transcript on the media you want cleaned, so transcribe first. See Transcribe Your Footage.

Run Umm Removal

1. Open the Process menu and click Umm Removal….
2. Under Tracks, check the audio tracks to scan. Tracks with nothing transcribed are greyed out, and if exactly one track has transcripts it's already checked for you.
3. To catch fillers beyond the built-in set, type them into Extra filler words, comma-separated, for example "kinda, sorta".
4. Under After detection, choose what happens once detection finishes.
5. Click Run.

The run then works in the background like any other tool. See Run an AI Tool for progress, cancelling, and failures. Your settings are remembered the next time you open the dialog, except the track selection.

Choose what happens after detection

The After detection dropdown has four options:

• None (detect only), the default, saves the detections without touching the timeline. Apply them whenever you're ready via Clip → Remove Umms…, described below.
• Disable turns each filler's span off in place. Nothing is removed and nothing moves, and the disabled pieces are skipped during playback. See Cut and Delete for turning them back on or sweeping them out.
• Lift removes each filler's span and leaves a gap behind.
• Ripple Delete removes each span and slides the clips after it left, closing the gaps.

Any choice other than None (detect only) applies the cuts right after detection finishes, limited to the tracks you picked, as one undo step. The dialog's own hint says the same.

Fine-tune the cuts

Expand the Advanced section of the run dialog for two sliders:

• Min clear gap (50 to 500 ms, default 150 ms) is how much silence must sit on both sides of a filler before it gets cut. Fillers packed tighter than this are kept rather than cut.
• Remaining pause (0 to 1000 ms, default 250 ms) is how much pause is left behind after a filler and the silence around it are removed. A higher value keeps more breathing room, a lower value tightens the pacing.

Apply detections later

If you ran with None (detect only), apply the cuts from the timeline when you're ready:

1. Select the clips you want cleaned up. The menu entry needs at least one selected clip on an audio track.
2. Open the Clip menu and click Remove Umms….
3. In the Remove Umms panel, pick an action: Disable, Lift, or Ripple Delete. Lift is the default.
4. Click Apply.

The panel floats over the timeline, which previews the cuts live: red regions for Lift and Ripple Delete, amber for Disable. A readout counts the fillers and seconds across your selected clips. If some of those clips haven't been scanned yet, a note says how many are covered, so run Umm Removal on the rest to include them.

Linked audio and video are always cut together, with no option to leave one side behind.

What happens to the transcript

The transcript text never changes, whether cuts were applied or not. The only marking is a subtle amber underline along the bottom of the pill holding a filler that was detected but kept, one packed too tightly to cut safely. It shows on the sentence pill, and on the word pill when the sentence is expanded. Fillers that can be cut cleanly get no marking at all.

Skipped cuts and undo

A planned cut that's too small to make cleanly is dropped and marked on the timeline with the same amber Cut skipped: no clean splice point marker that Rough Cut uses. See check for skipped cuts.

Whether the cuts were applied straight from the run or later through Clip → Remove Umms…, one press of Ctrl+Z undoes the whole pass in one step.