Automatically slicing and dicing a clip, removing silent sections.

Hi All,

One of the tasks find myself doing most often is editing long takes of interviews, etc. where there are significant pauses between takes and silent areas. Is there some automatic way in FCP to take a clip like this and have such sections automatically removed (so the end result on your timeline would be the one big clip gets split up into smaller clip pieces that each have volume).

Would be a nice little time saver if it exists

Thanks,
Keith

no advice for auto-deleting, but…

In the process of 'pre-edit' your recordings in the Browser (favorites, keywords, 'indexing', notes/transcripting) you DO select ranges with audio only … = no need to delete unwanted parts when you mark only wanted ones (subtractive editing vs. additive editing)

plus - what about wordless 'noddy shots', laughter, thinking-hmmmm, 'gemme-out-of-here-faces' shots?? Would ask for some threshold for an automatism … kinda… While tagging, you would select the best-of 'silent' shots either.

… just meant as to consider to adjust your workflow…

Yes what I am really looking for is slicing out based on a specified volume DB; that would be awesome.

As for silent parts that might be relevant; this is very rare for the kind of work I do, and as long as the resultant slices would exist like a regular timeline edit, I could always extended the ranges to recover a missed bit.

I programmed similar tools for other applications in the past; so it seems to me such a thing would be totally doable in FCP, as a plugin etc. But I guess no one has done this yet.

There is a product that will be released fairly soon that will help with this very sort fo thing. It's in beta testing now, but in another month or so we should hear publicly about it. So, a little patience...

But for now, I think you're looking at LumberJack from intelligent Assistance.

Cool; thanks for the info.

Logic has its “Strip Silence” feature, but that doesn’t help here.

If only the ported it for FCPX.

Hey there is a free tool for this now. I did not create the app, but I was searching for a similar solution. I created a tutorial for it on youtube. here:

The app is called Timebolt, It can be found at timebolt.io

cheers, Tim

The function in Logic only slices out the parts of the audio file that fall below a specified threshold. It doesn't close the gaps. In FCPX a Noise Gate does basically the same thing.