A project is one video you are making. This page covers creating it, choosing the style it is cut in, adding your footage, and what Snitt checks before it will start.
Create the project
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Click New project
Give it a name. The description is optional — it is a note to yourself.
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Pick a style under Cut in the style of
The menu lists every profile you have built, plus No profile — everything gets cut. This is the one choice a project cannot change later, and the sheet says what each option means.
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Check What Snitt cuts
Five switches, all on by default. Turn one off and Snitt will not make that kind of cut on this project.
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Click Create
The import page opens straight away. The project sits as a draft until you start it, and clicking a draft card brings this page back.
The five cut types
| Switch | What it removes |
|---|---|
| Silence | Long pauses and dead air between sentences. |
| Filler | Stalling sounds — um, uh — and verbal tics that carry no meaning. What your style keeps, Snitt keeps. |
| Retake | Abandoned attempts. When a line was recorded more than once, only the last take stays. |
| Noise | Production sounds between words — claps, thuds, page flips — and leftover scraps too short to keep. Laughs and breaths always stay. |
| Off-script | Talk that isn’t for the viewer: mic checks, notes to self, restarted recordings. |
These are the same five colours the cut key in the review window uses, so a switch here and a colour there always mean the same thing.
Choosing a profile
A project binds to one profile at creation and keeps it for life. Everything the rough cut takes from your style comes from that profile. See Style profiles for how it is built.
Three cases are worth knowing:
- A profile with published videos in it. Snitt cuts to that creator’s measured style.
- A profile with no videos yet. Nothing has been measured, so it cuts exactly like no profile at all. The sheet says so: No measured style — everything gets cut.
- No profile. Snitt uses generic settings: every filler goes, and pauses stay as recorded. The project card carries a Generic settings note.
If you later delete the profile a project uses, the project keeps working and falls back to generic settings.
Add your footage
Drop each file on the role it plays. Snitt never guesses roles.
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A-roll
The talking-head takes Snitt cuts. Video files only. At least one is required before a project can start.
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External audio
Your lav or shotgun recording. Audio files only. Optional — with no external audio, Snitt uses the camera track.
Drag files onto a zone, or use its Browse… button. A zone only accepts the kind of file it is for; anything else is refused with a short note on the zone.
Every file you add is listed below the drop zones with its role, its facts, and a status. Remove one with the × at the end of its row.
B-roll is not part of this release. Cutaway and screen-recording support arrives later; for now Snitt rough-cuts your A-roll and leaves B-roll to your editor.
What Snitt checks, per file
Checking runs the moment a file lands, one file at a time, and takes about a second each. A row shows one of four states:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Checking | Snitt is still looking at the file. |
| Ready | Readable, long enough, and it has the picture or sound its role needs. |
| Check this | Usable, but something is worth knowing — see the note on the row. |
| Unreadable | Snitt cannot use this file. Remove it to start. |
A file is refused when it cannot be read at all, when it is far too short to be a clip, when an A-roll file has no picture, when an external recording has no sound, or when it is badly damaged. A damaged file can open fine, report a sane duration, and still be missing a third of its picture, so Snitt checks the whole file. The row says what it found when it refuses.
Minor damage is a warning, not a refusal. The file is used and the row says so.
A-roll with no audio
A silent A-roll clip gets a dialog of its own:
“clip.mov” has no audio — This clip can’t be transcribed or cut — it will appear untouched in your timeline. Keep it?
Keep it takes the clip through as-is: it lands in your timeline whole, with no cuts, because there is nothing to transcribe. Remove drops it. If you dismiss the dialog, the row keeps a Use anyway button.
Mixed frame rates
If your A-roll clips do not share a frame rate, the footer notes mixed frame rates. It is a warning, not a block. Snitt handles the mixture, and the note is there so a frame rate you did not mean to shoot in does not reach the edit unnoticed.
The footer also warns when the disk is low on space, and names roughly how many megabytes the run needs for its working files.
Start it
The Start button turns on once every file is Ready, removed, or explicitly confirmed, and at least one A-roll clip is in. Until then the footer says what is missing — files still checking, unreadable files to remove, or files needing a decision.
Starting hands the project to Processing.
How it works
External audio is matched against your camera audio automatically. Snitt measures the loudness shape of both recordings and slides one against the other until they line up. You do not enter an offset and you do not clap-sync by hand. When a match is found, the external track becomes the audio Snitt transcribes and cuts against, and it rides the export as a connected clip under each kept segment.
Clip order is worked out, not asked for. AI reads your recordings and orders them logically on the timeline — an ending you shot first still lands at the end. You can rearrange them in review.
If something goes wrong
A file says Unreadable. Read the note on its row — it names the reason. A file Snitt calls badly damaged really is; re-export it from your camera card or your original project.
Start stays greyed out. The footer sentence is the answer. The usual causes are an unreadable file still in the list, a silent A-roll clip waiting on a decision, or no A-roll at all.
The external mic did not get used. Sync needs both recordings to contain the same sound. A file recorded at a different session, or one where the camera track is pure silence, has nothing to match against — Snitt falls back to camera audio and carries on. The preview pane in review shows a waveform icon when the synced external track is what you are hearing.
A clip landed in the wrong place on the timeline. The order is yours to change. In review, drag the recording’s chip in the top bar past its neighbours and the timeline re-lays to match. See reviewing the cut.
You picked the wrong profile. A project cannot change profiles. Create a new project with the right one and add the same footage; nothing about the files is changed by a run.