Editing
Trim Silence
Find and remove the dead air in your narration in one step.
The gaps between sentences add up. Trim Silence listens to your narration, finds the stretches of dead air, and removes them as ordinary timeline cuts — tightening a rambling take into a crisp one in a single step.
Using it
Press Trim Silence in the editor toolbar. Playback analyzes your audio (you’ll see an Analyzing… state), then removes the silent gaps it finds. The result is just regular cuts on the timeline — so your zooms and captions ripple to stay aligned, and a single ⌘Z reverts the whole thing if you don’t like it.
Choosing how aggressive to be
Right-click the Trim Silence button for presets that control how much it removes:
| Preset | Removes | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Only the longest, most obvious pauses. | Keeping a natural, unhurried pace. |
| Balanced | A sensible middle ground. | Most narrated demos. |
| Aggressive | Trims tighter, leaving little air. | Fast, punchy walkthroughs. |
What it protects
Trim Silence is careful about what counts as silence:
- It measures your take’s own noise floor, so it works whether you recorded in a quiet room or a noisy one — it’s not a fixed threshold.
- It won’t cut into your words. Short words survive, a stray keyboard clack can’t be mistaken for speech, and captioned speech is protected.
- It fails safe. If a take is music-only or the audio isn’t clear enough to judge, Playback tells you (“This take’s audio isn’t clear enough to trim automatically”) rather than shredding it. If there’s nothing to remove, you’ll see “No dead air found.”
Tips
- Start with Balanced, listen back, and switch to Light or Aggressive if the pacing isn’t right. It re-plans against the current timeline each time.
- Run it after your rough cut. Trim the ends and cut mistakes first, then let Trim Silence clean up the gaps that remain.