Editing video by deleting words in the transcript

Cutting an interview the traditional way means scrubbing through the waveform, listening for the start of each sentence, and trimming by ear. Text-based editing turns that around. You read the transcript like a document, select the words you don't want, and delete them, and the video edit follows. Video by Zaweba does this from its Transcript tab.

Making the transcript

The Transcript tab recognises the speech in your edit, working through it in pieces of about 30 seconds. The recognition runs on your PC, so it works offline and nothing is uploaded. When it finishes, you see the words laid out as text, each word linked to the moment it's spoken.

Cutting by deleting words

Select words in the transcript and press Delete, and those words are cut from the edit. The pictures and sound for that stretch go with them. It feels like editing a document, and for talk-heavy footage it's very fast.

This is ideal for tightening interviews, cutting a long talk down to its best parts, or taking the stumbles out of a piece to camera. Read through, delete the false starts and the repeated sentences, and the edit shrinks as you go.

Watch the joins afterwards. Cutting in the middle of a shot creates a jump cut, and you may want to hide it with the smooth jump cut transition or a cutaway. Text editing is quick, but the result still needs a look and a listen.

Remove pauses and filler words

Two commands do common tidying in one go. Remove pauses takes out the gaps where nobody is speaking, which tightens a slow recording. Remove filler words takes out the ums and ers that creep into natural speech.

Use them with care. Some pauses are part of how a person speaks, and taking every one out can make speech feel breathless. A few filler words make someone sound natural. Run the commands, then listen, and put back anything that sounded better with a beat of space.

Find and Save text

Find searches the transcript, which is the fastest way to jump to where someone mentions a topic in a long recording. Rather than scrubbing for twenty minutes, type the word and go there.

Save text writes the transcript out as a text file. That's useful for show notes, a written version for a blog post, or to send to someone who needs to review what was said without watching the video.

A practical way to work

Start with a rough pass in the transcript: delete whole sections you know you won't use. Then do a finer pass on what's left, removing stumbles. Use Remove pauses and Remove filler words near the end, and check the result.

Then switch to the timeline for the finishing work. Add cutaways over jump cuts, set transitions where they help, and mix the sound. Text-based editing in Video by Zaweba is a fast way to the shape of an edit; the timeline is where you polish it.

If more than one person is speaking, Find speakers labels who says what, which makes the transcript easier to read and edit.