Cut false starts

A false start is a phrase the speaker abandoned or said again. Deciding what counts is a judgement about meaning, so there’s no menu command for it. You ask the Assistant, and it finds the words and cuts them. To pick the words yourself, delete them in the Transcript tab.

Menu: View ▸ Assistant
Keys: ⌃⌘A
Where: Inspector ▸ Assistant tab
Needs: Your own Anthropic API key, set in Frame Job ▸ Settings… ▸ Assistant.
Agent tools: get_timeline_transcriptget_transcriptripple_delete_ranges

Cut a false start with the Assistant

Select the clip if you’re going to say “this clip”. Each message tells the Assistant what’s selected and where the playhead is.
Open the Assistant tab with View ▸ Assistant (⌃⌘A).
Ask for it, for example “cut the false start at the beginning of this clip.”
The Assistant reads the words and their times, tells you which words it will cut, and cuts them in one step.

It doesn’t wait for a go-ahead between telling you and cutting. If it took the wrong words, press ⌘Z. The Edit menu names the step Undo Ripple Delete.

The Assistant cuts a false start only when you ask.

What gets cut

The cut runs from the start of the first word to the start of the next word you keep, taking at most 1 second of the pause after the last cut word. That’s the range the Transcript tab cuts when you delete the same words by hand.

If that range would cut into a word on another unlocked track, it widens to take that whole word.

The timeline closes over the cut, as it does for every clean-up cut. See How a clean-up cut works.

Where the words come from

The Assistant reads a file’s kept AssemblyAI transcript when it has a current one. Otherwise it uses this Mac’s own speech recogniser, which reads the whole file once and keeps the words in the project, so later reads are immediate.

Neither way uploads audio or needs an AssemblyAI key. The words the Assistant reads do go to Anthropic as part of the conversation. See Assistant privacy.

Remove fillers and silences by asking

The Assistant can also do what the two clean-up sheets do.

Ask it to	What it does
Take out the silences	Finds the ranges Remove Silences would cut, then cuts them all at once.
Remove the filler words	Finds the ranges Remove Filler Words would cut, then cuts them all at once.

Each cut is one undo step, labelled Undo Ripple Delete rather than the sheet’s name.

The Assistant can find filler words this way only in files that already have a cloud transcript made with filler words. In any other file it finds none, and its search reports which files have no such transcript.

The Assistant won’t start a paid transcription

The Assistant can’t start a paid filler transcription, so you press Transcribe in the sheet yourself. Choose Clip ▸ Remove Filler Words…, check the price on the file’s row, and choose Transcribe. Then ask the Assistant again, or choose Remove in the sheet.

Audio leaves your Mac only when you choose it, with the price in front of you. The same goes for transcribing captions with AssemblyAI: use File ▸ Generate Captions…. See What it won’t do and what it asks first.

Good to know

A clip that’s muted, soloed out or at volume 0 isn’t heard, so it’s left out of the timeline’s words the Assistant reads.
The cut goes across every unlocked track. A locked track is neither cut nor moved.
With a nest open, the Assistant reads and cuts inside that nest, as you would.
If a file has no cloud transcript and its language isn’t installed on this Mac, the Assistant can’t read it, and it can’t download the language. Open File ▸ Generate Captions…, choose the language under Language, and press Download.