How to edit a screen recording by deleting words
Most screen recordings don’t need a video editor. They need the false start taken out, the “um, so, yeah” removed and the “ok, stop” at the end cut off. In Blazing Video you do all of that by editing text.
1. Record
Press ⌥⇧R from anywhere, talk, and press it again. Your Mac transcribes the take while you talk, so the transcript is ready about half a second after you stop. A moment later every word has its exact time in the audio, which is what makes the cuts clean.
2. Delete the words you don’t want
Open the take in the editor. Select some words in the transcript, by dragging or with ⇧ and the arrow keys, and press ⌫. The words are struck through and the video skips them. Press ⌫ again on struck-through words to bring them back, or use ⌘Z.
Click any word to jump the video there. Press Space to play from it and listen to the cut.
3. Cut fillers and tighten pauses
Two buttons do the boring part in one go:
- Cut Fillers removes every um, uh and similar filler. They’re tinted in the transcript first, so you can see what will go.
- Tighten Pauses shortens every pause longer than 0.4 seconds down to 0.15 seconds, so the video keeps moving without sounding chopped.
Each is a single undo step, so if you don’t like the result, ⌘Z puts it all back.
4. Trim the ends
Drag the start and end of the timeline in to lose the first second of you finding the right window and the last second of you reaching for the hotkey. Hold ⌥ while you drag to trim between words instead of snapping to them.
5. Update the link
When Blazing Video stops recording, the share link is already on your clipboard. If you sent it before editing, that’s fine: press Update Link and the same link plays the new cut. Captions and the transcript on the share page follow the cut too, so deleted words disappear from them as well.
Tips
- Record it twice, keep the best. If you fluff a sentence, just say it again and delete the first attempt afterwards. It’s quicker than stopping.
- Forgot something? Press Record More and it lands on the end of the same video, in the same transcript.
- Watch it fast. Click the speed button next to Play for 2× or 3× while you check your cuts.
- Let Claude do it. If you use Claude, say “cut the ums, tighten the pauses and share it”. See how to set that up.