Speed Up Typing

Speed Up Typing plays the typing in a screen recording faster, so a viewer doesn’t sit through every keystroke. Frame Job finds the typing from the recording’s cursor file, leaves anything spoken or any shortcut at normal speed, and makes the whole change one undo step.

Menu: Clip ▸ Speed Up Typing…
Where: New Recording panel ▸ When it lands ▸ Speed up typing
Needs: A screen recording made with Record shortcuts on. Speech detection runs on your Mac, with no key and no upload.
Agent tools: speed_up_typingget_cursor_events

Speed up the typing

Select the clip. Select both halves if you’ve split the recording, and any other recordings you want done at the same time.
Choose Clip ▸ Speed Up Typing…. It has no keyboard shortcut. The sheet reads “Reading cursor files…” for a moment, with Apply dimmed.
Set Rate, Shortest stretch and Keep pitch.
Read the summary under the settings, for example “2 typing stretches sped up ×4, saving 9.3 s.”
Choose Apply, or Cancel to leave the timeline as it was.

The menu item is dimmed unless every selected clip is a movie with a cursor file. It’s also dimmed while another sheet is open. It works inside an open nest, on the nest’s own clips and tracks.

The edit is one undo step, Speed Up Typing.

To do this for every recording as it arrives, tick Speed up typing in the recorder panel. See Polish when a recording lands.

What counts as typing

A typing stretch is a run of at least 3 typed keys, each less than 1 s after the last. It lasts from the first key to the last.

The keys come from the recording’s cursor file, which only holds them if the recording was made with Record shortcuts on. Without it the menu item still works, but the sheet finds no typing. The file holds when you typed, never what you typed, and nothing is noted while an app holds secure input, such as a password field.

Only typing in the part of the clip you’ve kept counts. Typing you’ve trimmed away is ignored.

Split recordings

The halves of a recording you split are treated as one when you select them both and they touch, so typing across the cut is one stretch. With one half selected, Frame Job only looks at that half.

The settings

Control	What it does	Default	Range
Rate:	How much faster the typing plays.	×4	×2 to ×8
Shortest stretch:	Typing shorter than this is left alone.	3 s	1 to 30 s
Keep pitch	Keeps the sped-up sound at its own pitch. Off, it rises like a fast tape. See Keep pitch.	On

The two number fields take up to two decimal places, and their values stay inside the range. The summary updates when you leave a field or change Keep pitch.

Frame Job remembers these from one use to the next. It saves a setting when you apply the edit, and only if you changed it, so Cancel saves nothing.

What the sheet tells you

The sheet says what Apply would do before you press it, or why nothing would happen.

The sheet says	What it means
“2 typing stretches sped up ×4, saving 9.3 s.”	What Apply will do.
“No typing stretch without speech or a shortcut lasts 3 s or more in the selected clips, so nothing would change.”	There’s nothing to speed. Apply stays dimmed. Try a lower Shortest stretch. The figure in the sentence follows that setting.
“Waiting for speech detection on …”	Frame Job is still finding the speech in the files it names. Apply is dimmed, and the sheet updates by itself.
“Speech detection has not finished for … Close this sheet and try again.”	It waited 5 minutes and stopped.
“… is offline, so its speech cannot be read.”	A file under a stretch is missing, so nothing changes. Relink it first.
“Speech detection is unavailable on this Mac, so Speed Up Typing cannot tell typing from talking.”	Speech detection can’t run here, so nothing changes.
“The typing from … cannot be sped up: …”	One stretch can’t be sped. See When it can’t speed up.

What stays at normal speed

Within each stretch, Frame Job sets aside every moment of speech and every shortcut, and leaves them at normal speed. What’s left is sped up, if it still lasts as long as Shortest stretch.

Speech

Any part of a stretch with speech under it stays at normal speed. That goes for every clip of a file with sound under the stretch, on any track, even if the clip is muted. So a voice on the Microphone track holds the typing back the same way sound in the movie does.

The speech comes from the same on-device detection Duck by Speech uses. If a file has no saved speech, Frame Job saves it with the project in the same undo step. If detection hasn’t finished, the sheet starts it and waits.

Shortcuts

A recorded shortcut and its overlay are never sped up. What stays at normal speed is the overlay’s whole clip on a track named Shortcuts, or 1.5 s from the press when there’s no overlay.

Add the overlays first, so that each one’s full length stays at normal speed.

The edges

Each sped stretch keeps 0.3 s at normal speed at both ends. Shortest stretch is measured before those edges come off. A 3 s stretch at ×4 speeds its middle 2.4 s down to 0.6 s, which saves 1.8 s. Cuts then land on frames, so the figures can differ slightly.

What the edit does to the timeline

Each stretch is sped with Retime Range on every unlocked track, so the camera and the microphone stay in sync with the screen and everything after moves up. A title or a graphic over a stretch is squeezed by the same amount, as Retime Range does it.

The sound in a sped stretch is sped too, because it’s cut and retimed with the picture.

If a clip would go silent

Rates multiply, so a clip already playing at ×2 goes to ×16 at a Rate of ×8. Frame Job leaves a clip’s sound out above ×12, so when Apply would take a clip with sound past that, an alert asks first.

Set Speed goes ahead. Cancel leaves the sheet open with nothing changed, so you can lower the Rate. See Sound at high speed.

When it can’t speed up

Speed Up Typing is all or nothing. If any stretch can’t be sped, nothing changes, Apply is dimmed, and the sheet names the stretch and the reason in place of the summary.

What stops it	What to do
A locked track has a clip that ends after the stretch begins.	Unlock the track.
A transition touches the stretch.	Remove the transition.
Half of a detached pair is in the stretch.	Use Attach Audio first.
A selected clip plays reversed. The sheet reads “Clip … plays reversed; Speed Up Typing speeds only clips that play forward.”	Leave that clip out, or turn off Reverse.
The cursor file is missing or won’t read.	Use Locate… in the Cursor section of the Media tab. See Cursor files.

A stretch can also be stopped by anything else that stops Retime Range, such as a nest clip or a caption page with timed words. See When a range can’t be retimed.

With an agent

speed_up_typing makes the same edit, with these differences:

It takes one clip or a list of clips, not both, rather than reading the selection.
It can limit the edit to part of the timeline, which the sheet can’t.
It doesn’t remember anything. It starts from ×4, 3 s and pitch kept unless told otherwise.
It doesn’t wait for speech detection. It says the speech hasn’t been detected yet, and to try again in a moment.
It never asks about ×12. The clip’s sound is left out, and it reports that when it finishes.

get_cursor_events reads a recording’s typing stretches and changes nothing. See speed_up_typing.