Video editing1 min read
Take the umms and long pauses out of a lesson video
A good take with a few umms in it does not need a re-shoot. On a bernard-hosted site, your AI can render a cleaned copy of a lesson video: the fillers go, long pauses shrink to a beat, and your original stays where it was.
The prompt
“In the [lesson name] lesson of my [course name] course, take the umms and long pauses out of the video. Show me how much you’d cut before you do it.”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
How it works
- Connect bernard to your AI (once). Log in to bernard, open your site, go to Use your own AI, and paste the setup prompt into your AI to connect it.
- Ask for a proposal. Say which lesson. Your AI reads the word timings and tells you how many fillers and pauses it would cut and how many seconds that saves. Nothing changes yet.
- Say yes. The cleaned copy renders in the background and becomes the lesson’s video. Captions, transcript, chapters and the poster frame are made again for the new timing, and any translated subtitles are re-run.
What it cuts, and what it leaves
- A filler word such as um, uh, erm or ah, but only when silence sits on both sides of it.
- A pause longer than about a second, shortened to a short beat. Ask for “fillers only” to keep your pauses as they are.
- It never cuts a stretch you point at, and it cannot take a section out of the middle. For the start and end of a video, see Cut the dead air off the start and end of a lesson video.
- It works on the lesson’s main video, for videos up to an hour long. Audio-only lessons are not covered yet.
The cleaned copy counts as a second file in your site’s storage. Your original upload is kept so you can always go back.
Questions people ask
- Will it cut real words?
- No. A filler is only removed when there is a clear gap of silence on both sides of it, so the words next to it are never clipped. If a filler runs straight into the next word it is left alone.
- Can I undo it?
- Yes. Your original upload is kept, and nothing reaches learners until you approve the change. Ask your AI to put the original video back on the lesson and it does, with no re-upload.
- Why did it say there was nothing to remove?
- The take is already clean: no isolated fillers and no pauses over about a second. That is good news, not a fault.
- What happens to my captions, chapters and translated subtitles?
- They are made again for the new timing. Captions and chapters come back within a few minutes; translated subtitles are re-run automatically and take a little longer. For that short while they read as not ready.