Editing the transcript edits the video: select words in the Transcript tab and delete them, and ChatCut cuts that time range out of the timeline for you — no manual trimming required.
How do I edit video by editing the transcript?
- Open the Transcript tab. It lives inside the My Assets panel group, next to Library and Templates.
- Pick a view from the panel’s dropdown: “Paragraph view” (default — natural, article-like paragraphs that can span multiple clips) or “Clip view” (one paragraph per timeline cut, better for cut-by-cut work). Your choice is remembered next time you open the panel.
- Select the words you want gone and press Backspace or Delete (Cmd/Ctrl-Backspace or Cmd/Ctrl-Delete also work). ChatCut splits the underlying clip at the word boundaries, removes that piece, and ripples the track closed — deleting text really does cut the video. Only the track you’re editing ripples; other tracks never shift.
- Click any word to jump the player to that word’s start time and scroll the timeline to match. Words that are already cut render with a strikethrough and can’t be clicked to seek.
- Fix wording, delete a line, or reassign who said it without leaving the transcript: select text and the popup tooltip gives you “Delete selection”, “Edit text”, and “Change speaker”. Editing a single word updates just that word; editing a multi-word selection replaces the whole span with your new text while keeping the span’s original start/end timing.
- Undo or redo with Cmd/Ctrl-Z and Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-Z (or Cmd/Ctrl-Y) — transcript edits sit on the same undo stack as the rest of the timeline.
What else can the Transcript panel do?
- Speaker labels. Speakers are auto-detected and auto-colored when transcription runs. Double-click a speaker label to rename it. Click it to open a reassign menu that lists every speaker (with their color), lets you add a “New Speaker” on the spot, or check “Reassign all from {speaker}” to merge one speaker’s entire history into another. Selecting a run of text and choosing a different speaker reassigns just those words; a speaker left with zero words is deleted automatically.
- Paragraph and clip moves. Deleting a whole paragraph removes the underlying clip in Clip view, or removes all of that paragraph’s words (recoverable via the strikethrough cut history) in Paragraph view. Also in Clip view, drag a paragraph to a new position to reorder the clip on the timeline.
- Gaps. Empty space between clips shows inline as a “Gap: <duration>” widget with a “Close gap” button that shifts everything after it left to fill the space.
- Pauses slider. The toolbar’s “Pauses” control is a 0–2000 ms slider (50 ms steps, default 500 ms) with an Apply button that resets every pause on the track to that length in one action. It’s a one-shot pass, not a saved setting, and it works both ways — sliding to a longer value restores pause time that existed in the original recording, it never invents silence that wasn’t there.
- Filler-word cleanup. Separately from manual deleting, ChatCut can strike filler words automatically: “um”, “uh”, “er”, “ah” in English and “呃”, “额” in Chinese. Ambiguous words like “嗯”/“啊”/“哦” are deliberately left alone because they can carry real meaning.
- Long-pause cleanup. The same automatic pass compresses pauses over 3 seconds down to 200 ms and pauses over 1 second down to 600 ms by default.
- Track selector. Projects with more than one track show a selector labeled V1/V2… for video and A1/A2… for audio, so you can point the transcript at the track you want.
- Shortcuts. Space plays/pauses the video (it doesn’t type a space). Left/Right arrow moves the cursor word by word; Shift+Arrow extends the selection word by word. In Clip view only, Enter splits the clip immediately before the word your cursor is on.
- Selecting for the AI. If you select transcript text while talking to the AI, it receives that exact selection — which words, their timing, and the speaker — as context, so you can say what you want done with the highlighted part instead of describing it from scratch.
See also: How is the ChatCut editor laid out.