Shorten long pauses

A long pause reads as dead air in a finished video. Rooster measures the silence between words and offers to shorten every pause over a length you choose, leaving a short, natural gap in its place.

Shorten pauses across the recording

1. Choose Enhance > Shorten long pauses…, or press the pause button in the timeline's toolbar (Shorten long pauses across the whole recording).
2. Set Pauses longer than: only pauses over this length are offered. It starts at one second.
3. Set Shorten them to: every offered pause becomes this long. It starts at 0.2 seconds.
4. Rooster lists each pause between the words either side, with how long it is now and how long it will be. Press a row's time to play it. Untick any to keep.
5. Press Shorten. The button says how many pauses, and how much shorter the video gets.

Rooster keeps the silence just after the word before each pause and removes the rest. It is a cut like any other: the recording is unchanged, and one Undo (⌘Z) brings every pause back. Your two lengths are remembered for next time.

Shorten or cut one pause

On the timeline, the word lane shows each pause between words as a chip of its own. Right-click a long one to shorten it to your length, or choose Cut pause to remove it entirely. Selecting a pause chip and pressing Delete cuts it too.

Trim silence at the start and end

Silence before the first word and after the last is a separate tool, because it is not a pause between words.

1. Choose Enhance > Trim silence at the start and end…, or press its button in the timeline's toolbar.
2. Rooster shows Before the first word and After the last word, each with its length and a Play button. An end is offered only when its silence is half a second or more.
3. Untick either to keep it, and press Trim.

This works from the sound itself, so it does not need a transcript.

When nothing is offered

Pause shortening needs a transcript with word timings, and the pauses measured. If Rooster has not measured this video's pauses yet, it says so; the measurement runs while the media is read. If no pause is over your length, lower Pauses longer than.