Automatically remove silence from a video

[Geoff Mark]

This seems straightforward to implement.  I would like to see a tool in Premiere Pro that allows the editor to remove sections of video that are silent in their audio track.  We would need to define "silence" (maximum audio level) and Length of slience to remove (longer than X seconds or milliseconds or frames.)  For an extra option, perhaps a way to move all the removed video slices to a new timeline or at some timecode on the current timeline.  Another option would be to join these new automatically created edits with straight cuts, or with a choice of transitions.  

Example:  I edit lectures.  Sometimes the speaker takes a dramatic pause, usually less than a second.  Other times, he or she pauses to review their notes.  These are often 2 seconds or longer.  If I could remove the latter while keeping the former, I could get through that busywork and down to the creative editing work quicker.  I usually use crossfade between these edits.

Thank you.

[John V Knowles]

As a workaround for now, you can try generating captions for your videos (not sure if you were doing that already) and just look for the gaps; if those sections are truly silent then there will be significant gaps between the caption blocks and you can use those to power through your edits.

[Geoff Mark]

That might work better than what I currently do, which is look through the waveform for obvious silences.  Thank you.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey Geoff, 

It's a significant feature request, especially for those that do "jump cut" talking heads videos. I don't enjoy the aesthetic, as I was trained to hide any jump cuts. However, times change, and I respect the number of people who want this feature. Your job sounds like this feature would come in quite handy!

An editor may also be forced into doing so because the talent cannot memorize a long script, has no teleprompter, or is improvising and making errors—too many to cover up with B-roll, perhaps. I've watched an editor doing the latter. It's painful to watch his workflow. With that said, I might even find a use for this too. 

Whatever the reason: I upvoted.

If you have FFMPEG installed, you can delete silence right now. More info on the script is here.

Kevin

[Geoff Mark]

Kevin - 

Fair point, and thank you for the sugesstion and the upvote.

You are correct - asking software to avoid jumpcuts is probably beyond even the best A.I. today.  That's not what I'm asking for.  If Premiere could knock out silences and mark where it's done so, and perhaps leave X number of frames or milliseconds of silence on either side, I could do the human/creative work of cleaning it all up.  Or for times where a client simply wants to see what we captured without slogging through dead air - a common request - when this feature would turn several hours' work into a few minutes.
- Geoff

[jerry_2000]

While not in Premiere, silenceslicer.com lets you do it on the web, and you can export it to load it back into Premiere if you want.