Show HN: Edit videos faster by automatically removing silences

I watched the demonstration videos on the landing page, and the effect wasn&#x27;t as bad as I often see on some youtube videos, but I think that&#x27;s because the subject was sitting at a desk, rather than standing, moving around much more.<p>Anecdata - heavily jump-cut edits on youtube instantly inspire me to find an alternative source of the same information, as the breathless, rapid-fire, jerky-video, sensation is irksome. Evidently I&#x27;m in the minority, and I&#x27;m okay with that.

Very nice! As someone who wrote a native tool to do pretty much this (Recut &#x2F; getrecut.com) it&#x27;s super impressive to see it done in a web browser. The editor feels very fast and fluid.<p>Doing it natively was hard enough, and recently I&#x27;ve been rewriting Recut with Rust + Electron so I have an idea of how much work it was to get it working well :sweat-smile: Keep up the good work y&#x27;all!

This is basically an attention killing machine and I&#x27;m not talking about the method, the method is OK and not novel. I have found that these time cuts completely ruin my ability to concentrate and after it happens 2-3 times in a short period, I lose interest in the video because it is so annoying.

Honestly the constant jump cut style of editing feels so unnatural to me... I&#x27;d rather watch someone takes pauses and not be taken out of the moment.... I&#x27;m sure this has applications particularly in advertising&#x2F;marketing but it&#x27;s not without outs issues.

Reminds me of the tool presented in [1], which also shows some interesting applications. Apparently an improved version is now being sold on its own platform [2], but the original Python script is still available on Github [3].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DQ8orIurGxw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DQ8orIurGxw</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jumpcutter.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jumpcutter.com</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;carykh&#x2F;jumpcutter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;carykh&#x2F;jumpcutter</a>

Whoa. For years I&#x27;ve been seeing YouTube videos that seem to just teleport choppily around what I assumed were silences. I always assumed there was a standard tool that everyone used to do this. I can do the equivalent thing to a podcast episode in like 5 seconds in Logic. The notion that people have been doing this by hand is staggering, but kudos to you for finally coming along and filling this niche.

I get the use case. Not sure there&#x27;s enough value here as a cloud-based SaaS product. I use a similar product called Recut (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getrecut.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getrecut.com&#x2F;</a>). $99 one-time fee (no subscription). Easy to open the edited project in NLEs. macOS only. Unclear that Kapwing is a better option when Recut would be breakeven at seven months and you can don&#x27;t need to round trip videos in the cloud.

I don&#x27;t know if any other apps do this but there are plenty of Japanese youtube channels that do this<p>This one in particular is the one where I was introduced to the style but it certainly wasn&#x27;t the first to do this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;%E6%9C%89%E9%9A%A3%E5%A0%82%E3%81%97%E3%81%8B%E7%9F%A5%E3%82%89%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;%E6%9C%89%E9%9A%A3%E5%A0%82%E3%81%...</a><p>To be clear, they aren&#x27;t just cutting out silence, they are cutting them to the point that it&#x27;s a style and the speech pattern, particularly of the Owl character, sounds unnatural, which I&#x27;m assuming is what they were going for. It&#x27;s that style of nearly cutting phrases together faster than they would be naturally spoken is the thing I&#x27;m saying is a trend in some Japanese videos.<p>Note: The channel itself is run by a stationary store chain from Tokyo. The funny part is the Owl character often makes fun of what they&#x27;re showing as in &quot;why would anyone buy this?&quot; or &quot;That&#x27;s way too expensive&quot; which is funny for a channel run by a store selling most of things they&#x27;re showing off.

Congrats on the launch Shah! I can tell you stayed up late giddy for this launch :D. As another peer building for video creators, I am delighted to see more efficiency features like this released.<p>This approach was the one I tried first also (I also tried the frequency one fwiw, which has its own, worse drawbacks). But using loudness runs into issues if the source loudness isn&#x27;t (relatively) even across the entire source media. Using a single sensitivity setting like this would be a problem if:<p>* recording gain is set to automatic, and there are sudden changes in noise floor like wind (if recorded in 24-bit or lower)<p>* crew adjusts gain partway through recording (big no-no but happens)<p>* talent&#x2F;host moves in and out of microphone sweet spot<p>* talent&#x2F;host adjusts themselves in a squeaky chair during silence or transition-to-silence (or coughs, or breaths loudly, or ambulance goes by...)<p>If you apply the edit w&#x2F; a single sensitivity and something like the above is true, it would cut in the wrong place. Unfortunately, you would have to watch the entire show, skipping to boundaries with your full attention to know that ever got a cut wrong.

Weird. I edit a lot of videos but this is basically not something I have ever needed. The natural cadence of speakers is more valuable to me.

If it&#x27;s the type of video where cutting silence automatically is viable, I wish they would just write out the transcript.<p>You can read what they&#x27;re saying in a fraction of the time it takes to watch a video, and often internalize it better.

I use final cut to edit videos. Two things I haven&#x27;t figured out how to do is to automatically that I would love an automatic solution to:<p>1. Cross fade the audio between clips, without crossfading the video, if the sound is available past the cut point. I think its pretty much 90% of the time that I would want something like that.<p>2. I have clips from a gopro that had a selfie stick that made a loud clicky sound from rattling that peaks above regular audio. Some way to lower the volume on that clicky noise without having to manually go through and do it for each click.

I believe there is (or was) a product used by TV stations which would semi-automatically re-edit a movie to fit in a specific amount of time, mostly by removing the start of end of a cut where not much was happening on the audio or video. Assuming I&#x27;m not completely imagining that, anyone know what it&#x27;s called?

I&#x27;m glad there you guys made this option available in the browser. For those that don&#x27;t know, YouTubers can spend more than 50% of their time editing on just cutting&#x2F;trimming down silences!<p>Source: I am a YouTuber.<p>I even tried to tackle this problem in 2021 by building Atomic Edits[0] - an electron desktop app that did the same thing! I built a working prototype, but eventually stopped working on it after realizing that lots of web-based video editors started offering this functionality. In retrospect, it was obvious that doing this in the browser with cloud saves was way better.<p>Anyways, nice work! I&#x27;ll check it out later.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.github.com&#x2F;SuboptimalEng&#x2F;atomic-edits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.github.com&#x2F;SuboptimalEng&#x2F;atomic-edits</a>

Instead of cutting out the silence spots, why not speed them up? If the presenter is silent b&#x2F;c they are drawing something on the board (like in a lecture), then the result will feel a choppy.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Harold Pinter is cursing.

On the about page you mentioned that you raised instead of continuing on the bootstrapped path. What made you pull the trigger?<p>My first impression when I checked out the landing page and product was: this is a perfect bootstrapped SaaS product idea to grow to meaningful ARR with a small team of 2-3 + some hired help for things like customer support.

The tool seems useful, but listening to the edited audio gives a suffocating feeling, because the speaker makes no pauses to breathe. Absolutely terrible sensation, exactly like I had earlier with commercial news radio stations that were packed with advertizing and announces.

This service seems very similar to another product I saw here months ago on Show HN called SavvyCut (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savvycut.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savvycut.com&#x2F;</a>).<p>Can you comment on differences?

How would you compare your offering Descript? The pricing appears similar.

I use ffmpeg for this. It has some silence removal options described in the man page. I&#x27;ve never gotten it to work really well, but for the stuff I do, it helps.

Like this a lot, will save time on rough cutting. Did you use a library for volume detection?

love the creativity in finding new use cases for AI that ...really make sense.

Isn&#x27;t this a basic function in Audacity (for audio)?

I already have a free plugin that does this :(