Playing a video with sound in Cut by Zaweba
Press Space in Cut by Zaweba to play with sound. The sound sets the pace and late frames are skipped, so playback keeps up even on a modest PC.
Before you cut anything you need to watch it, and watching needs to feel right. Cut by Zaweba plays a video with its sound when you press Space, and the way it does that is designed to stay smooth and in sync, including on PCs that struggle with heavier video software.
Pressing play
Space plays. Playback streams frames at preview size and sends the sound through your sound card, so you hear the video as you watch it. That is what you need for most cutting jobs, because the sound is often the best guide to where something starts or ends: the moment someone starts speaking, the applause after a song, the advert break's jingle.
The sound is the clock
Here is the part that makes it work on modest machines. During playback the sound sets the timing. Cut plays the audio at its natural pace and shows the picture to match. If a frame is not ready in time, it is skipped rather than holding everything up.
The result is that the sound never stutters or drifts. On a fast PC you won't notice anything, because frames are always ready. On a slow one you might see the picture become a little less smooth during busy scenes, but speech stays in step with lips and the timing of what you hear stays true. For finding cut points, that is the right trade, because a stuttering soundtrack makes it much harder to judge where things happen.
Preview size and low-spec mode
Playback runs at preview size, 1280x720 normally. In low-spec mode it drops to 640x360. Low-spec mode switches on by itself on PCs with under 8 GB of memory or no separate graphics card, and you can force it on or off in Settings.
A smaller preview means far less work for each frame, which is what keeps playback flowing on an older laptop. It doesn't affect what you save. Cuts, joins and conversions work on the full video, not the preview.
Playback and precise cutting
Playing is for finding the area; stepping is for finding the frame. Once playback brings you close to where you want to cut, stop and use the arrow keys to move frame by frame, Shift with the arrows to jump keyframe to keyframe, or Ctrl with the arrows to move a second at a time. Preview frames are exact in every container, so the frame you stop on is the frame you will cut at.
Then mark in with I and out with O, and choose whether to cut that part out or keep only it. The scrub bar shows kept and cut parts as you go, so you can play across a cut afterwards and check it sounds right.
Getting the best from playback
Use sound to find cut points. Close your eyes if you need to and listen for the gap. Pauses in speech and quiet moments between scenes make the cleanest cuts.
Don't judge picture quality from the preview. It is sized for speed. If you want to see a frame properly, extract it as a PNG at full size.
On a struggling PC, let low-spec mode do its job rather than forcing it off. A smaller preview that keeps up is more useful than a larger one that drops lots of frames.
Turn on View > Show the filters in the preview when you are adjusting brightness, contrast or other picture filters, so playback shows the effect live before you save.
Where playback fits
Playback sits between opening a video and cutting it. Open a file, check its Details, play through to find the parts you care about, then step, mark and cut. It is a small tool, but it is the one you use most, so it is built to keep up whatever the PC.
