Clean up talking-head audio before you start cutting

In a talking-head video the voice carries everything. A plain background is easy to live with, and a muddy voice or long silences wear a viewer down. This workflow takes a raw single-speaker recording and gets the sound ready before you polish the picture.

Strip music and noise with Isolate voice

Isolate voice is one of the Quick tools on the Projects page. It works on a video file without any timeline work.

1. In the sidebar, open Editor and choose Video to reach Projects.
2. In the Quick tools row, choose Isolate voice.
3. Drop in a video, or press Choose a file.
4. Press Run.

DepCut pulls the audio out of the video, removes the music and background noise, keeps the speech, puts the cleaned track in place of the original and renders a new file. Keep the dialog open until your download starts. The step uses credits, by the length of the video.

Bring the downloaded file into your editing project: open Media and press Upload. The cleaned voice now lives inside the clip.

The same row has Isolate music, which keeps the music and removes the voice. A faint trace of the voice can remain. Extract audio saves the sound as MP3, AAC (.m4a) or WAV, and Mute audio strips the audio track.

Find the dead air

1. With the clip on your timeline, open the Subtitles tab and press Generate subtitles. Transcription spends credits.
2. Open Content. The transcript shows each line with a timestamp.
3. Look for pause markers. When the gap between two lines is longer than half a second, a small chip such as "· 1.2s ·" appears above the next line.
4. Click a line's timestamp to jump the playhead to that line.

The chip sits above the line that follows the pause. The pause starts where the previous line ends and finishes at the timestamp of the line below the chip.

Some long pauses work as a beat before a key point. Cut the ones that sound like hesitation and keep the ones that sound like emphasis.

You can also ask the assistant in the chat box to look for silent stretches in the clip. Check what it proposes before you accept the cuts.

Cut the pauses

Cut while the sound still lives inside the video clip, so the picture and the voice stay together.

1. Select the clip and put the playhead at the start of the pause.
2. Press Split in the right panel, or use ⌘B or S.
3. Move the playhead to the end of the pause and split again.
4. Select the piece in the middle and press Delete.

With one video track, deleting a clip closes the gap it leaves. Play across the join. If the voice jumps, undo and split a little further into the quiet side of the pause so the breath stays whole on both sides.

Set the level of the voice

Click the video clip and open its Volume tab. Clip volume runs up to 150 percent. If the speech is quiet, raise it a little at a time and listen for any hiss rising with it.

To fade the voice or let it quiet music underneath, click the clip's Clip options button on the timeline and choose Detach audio. The sound moves to a green soundtrack bar and the video clip is muted. The new bar has Volume, Fade in, Fade out and Duck tabs. Set Duck others on it and any music you add dips whenever the voice plays.

Check the result

• Play the whole clip from the top once.
• Listen on headphones for hiss, clicks and leftover music.
• On a detached voice bar, add short fades at the cuts so each edit lands without a click.

Put it to work

Open DepCut, run Isolate voice on a short recording, and compare it with the original. Then cut the pauses and listen again.