You review the cut by editing the transcript. Strike a word and it leaves the video; click a struck word and it comes back. This page covers every surface in the review window.
The layout
Four areas, kept in sync with each other:
- Top bar — the recordings on this timeline, in Snitt’s order, plus the Export button.
- Transcript (top left) — the primary editing surface.
- Preview (top right) — the picture and the transport.
- Timeline (bottom) — chapters, video and audio tracks, waveforms, and every cut drawn in place.
One position is shared between them. Wherever the playhead is, the transcript marks the word being spoken, the timeline draws the line, and the preview shows that frame. Select something in any pane and the other two follow.
Reading the transcript
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Struck-through text is cut
The strike is drawn in the colour of the reason it was cut. The key sits under the pane header and names all six.
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Click a struck span to bring it back
Select it and press Restore in the bar that appears at the bottom of the pane, or right-click the word and choose Restore.
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Click kept words to cut them
Select and press Cut, or press ⌫. That is a cut of your own — it gets its own colour, Your cut.
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Hide the cuts to read the finished video
⌘D switches between the full recording and the cut. Playback follows: with cuts hidden you are watching the edit as it will export.
Selecting
- One click selects a word.
- Double-click selects the sentence around it.
- Triple-click selects the whole segment.
- Shift-click extends the selection to there.
- Drag across the text selects a run.
A selection puts a bar at the bottom of the pane: how many words, the timecodes it spans, a play button, Cut before / Cut after (for a sound sitting in the gap either side — a cough, a bang, something the recogniser gave no word to), Adjust, Cut, and Restore.
Right-clicking a word offers Cut and Restore directly.
The cut key
Under the header, while cuts are shown, sits a row of six colours:
| Colour | Reason |
|---|---|
| Silence | A pause longer than you normally leave. |
| Filler | A stalling sound or a meaningless tic. |
| Retake | An abandoned attempt at a line. |
| Noise | A production sound, or a scrap too short to keep. |
| Off-script | Talk that wasn’t for the viewer. |
| Your cut | Something you cut by hand, or a suggestion you accepted. |
Each colour is also a handle for its whole category. Click one and you get Restore all N and Cut all N again.
If the pane is too narrow for the full row, it collapses to a single Key chip whose popover carries the same colours and the same actions.
Pauses you sometimes keep
A pause Snitt has left in shows as a dim [pause] token in the text. Hover it and the tooltip
gives its length and says Pause you sometimes keep — Cut removes it. Click it and cut it like any
other word; it is restorable afterwards like any other cut.
Pauses longer than your measured range are cut for you, and they read as a struck [pause] in
the Silence colour.
Fillers that are your style
Where your profile shows you keep a hesitation or a tic, Snitt keeps it too. Those words read a shade dimmer than the ones around them, and the tooltip says Kept — matches your style; Cut removes it. Nothing suggests removing them.
Which file a paragraph came from
Every paragraph carries a coloured stripe in its margin, and the colour is the source recording. The chips in the top bar are the legend. Click a chip and the transcript jumps to that recording’s first visible word.
The chips are also the running order: drag one past its neighbours to re-lay the timeline. The zone label says so — Snitt’s order, drag to rearrange.
Suggestions
Snitt cuts what a rule can decide. Anything that needs judgment arrives as a suggestion instead, and nothing is removed until you say so.
A suggested span is marked with a dotted orange underline. Click it and a card opens right under the words:
- what kind of suggestion it is, its timecode and its length;
- one line saying why;
- Accept and Reject.
Accepting makes the cut, and it becomes a Your cut. Rejecting closes the card and leaves the words alone.
The count sits in the pane header with two chevrons beside it. They step through the open suggestions one at a time, scrolling each into view. With a card open, ⏎ accepts and ⌫ rejects, so a long list is chevron, read, decide, chevron.
The counter disappears at zero.
The preview
The picture, and under it the transport: play/pause, the speed badge, the current timecode against the duration, and the selection’s range on the right. A waveform icon appears when what you are hearing is the synced external mic rather than camera audio.
The speed badge shows the current rate and cycles it when clicked: 1×, 2×, 4×, 8×, 16×, 32× and back around. It carries a minus sign while you are running backwards.
J, K, L
The standard shuttle:
- L plays forward. Press it again and the speed doubles — 1×, 2×, 4×, 8×, 16×, 32×. It stops climbing at the top rather than wrapping.
- J is the same thing backwards.
- K stops.
Changing direction starts the ladder over. If your footage will not decode at the speed you asked for, Snitt scrubs the picture instead of playing it, and the badge says so.
Playback runs on the cut, not on the raw file. With cuts hidden you are previewing the edit as it will export, splices and fades included.
The timeline
Bottom of the window, and every mark on it is clickable.
- Chapters. When Snitt has a plan for the video, a slim lane above the tracks draws its sections. Click one to jump there and select the whole beat.
- Video track. One block per clip, in timeline order, with thumbnails. Removed spans are drawn in place — click one and it selects everything that was cut there: the filler, the abandoned take and the pause between them.
- Audio tracks. The camera audio per clip, and the synced external recording under all of it, with waveforms.
- Ruler and playhead. Click anywhere to seek. Drag across to select a time range.
- Zoom. The slider and the two magnifier buttons, ⌘- and ⌘=, or a pinch on the trackpad.
Adjusting where a cut starts and ends
Select a word and press Adjust in the selection bar. Snitt zooms the timeline onto that splice and puts a resizing bar in the timeline header, with the IN and OUT points as editable fields.
- Drag either handle, or type a timecode into its field.
- ← / → nudge the active handle one frame; hold ⇧ for ten.
- ⇧Space plays what you have, both handles included.
- Reset puts both ends back on Snitt’s own cut.
- ⏎ keeps it, Esc throws the session away.
The readout beside each field shows how far you have grown the segment, always signed.
Finding words
⌘F drops a find bar under the header. Type, press ⏎ for the next hit and ⇧⏎ for the previous, or use the chevrons. Esc closes it. Hits stay highlighted as you step past them.
Undo
⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z, and the Edit menu names the action you are about to undo. Every gesture is one step: a drag-select strike of two hundred words undoes as one.
Your edits are saved as you make them. Closing the project and coming back finds the cut where you left it.
How it works
Every automatic change is already applied, and every one is reversible. You watch the result and restore the parts you want back, which is why cut material stays visible in the transcript and on the timeline.
Colour says where it came from; decoration says what Snitt did. The stripe and the chips are source files. Strikes, dots and underlines are edits. The two channels never mix.
Nothing arrives silently removed. AI reads your transcript, but every automatic cut is then made by a fixed rule against what your profile learned. Anything the rule cannot settle becomes a suggestion instead of a cut.
If something goes wrong
A key does nothing. If the keyboard is in a text field — a find box, a timecode — the field gets the key first. Click in the transcript or the timeline and try again.
Space types a space instead of playing. Same cause. A field has the keyboard.
A cut you restored still sounds wrong at the joint. Use Adjust on it. Snitt looks for the quietest place to put a join, but a clap or a breath right on the boundary is worth moving by hand.
Words you cut come back after a re-run. Processing a project again produces a fresh cut. Your review edits belong to the cut you were reading, so make them once the run has finished.
The transcript is empty. The project has no cut on this machine — the job has not finished, or its results were never downloaded. The pane says so and offers a way back to your projects.
When you are happy with it, go to Export to Final Cut or Export MP4. The full key list is on Keyboard shortcuts.