Chapter 5

Cleanup

Make the script read clean before you start selecting.

Cleanup is the first editing page. It reads like a document: every line is editable text. Here you fix transcription typos, split run-on lines, and remove filler sounds, so that when you move to Select, the script is clean and easy to skim.

The Cleanup page. Each row is a sentence you can read and edit, with the speaker and timecode on the left.

The golden rule of Cleanup

In Cleanup the only safe edits are correcting spelling and splitting a line in two. Do not delete or retype whole words: doing so pulls your text out of sync with the per-word timecodes and the audio, and your export will drift. To drop an “um,” open the Tools menu, then Remove fillers. To drop a word or line from the final cut, deselect it on the Select page. To remove an entire off-topic stretch, delete the whole row.

Editing a line

Click into any line to fix a typo. Press Enter in the middle of a line to split it into two rows at the cursor, useful when the transcriber ran two sentences together. Typing a full stop at the end of a sentence splits the row there on its own, and pressing Backspace at the very start of a row joins it back to the row above. The runtime and word state stay aligned automatically.

The Cleanup header: the page menu, full screen, find, the Tools menu, the total runtime, AI cleanup, and the transcript download.

Deleted rows are never gone for good: they land in the Trash drawer (in the page ⋯ menu), where Put back restores a strip and Put all back restores everything. This works on every editing page.

Remove fillers

Open the Tools menu (the grid icon), then click Remove fillers to find the hesitation sounds, um, uh, hmm, and the like, across the whole transcript. ScriptCut shows you exactly what it found and asks you to confirm before anything changes. Numbers and measurements such as “35mm” are never touched. The same Tools menu also holds Manage speakers and Check spelling.

Once confirmed, those words are dimmed and struck through. A small amber filler icon (two lines with an X between them) sits beside any row that has filler cuts, and they read clean everywhere downstream: on Select, in Review, in the PDF, and in your timeline export. Click that icon and choose Reset fillers to bring back only the fillers: your spelling fixes and other cuts stay. The same option is in the row menu.

After removing fillers, the cut words show faint and struck through, with an amber filler icon beside affected rows.

Check spelling

Open the Tools menu and choose Check spelling. ScriptCut scans the whole transcript against a dictionary built into the app, so it is free and never uses AI credits. A review window lists each suspect word once, with up to three suggested corrections and the sentence it appears in; picking a correction fixes every occurrence at once, and nothing changes until you press Fix. It deliberately skips names, brands, ALL-CAPS words, and anything with a digit, so the list stays short. Add to dictionary teaches it a word for good on your account, and a Your dictionary section lets you edit the saved words. A correction always swaps one word for one word, so your timecodes never shift.

Spelling underlines are on by default: misspelled words get a red wavy line right in the transcript, exactly like a word processor. Hover one (tap it on a phone) to see its corrections and fix it on the spot. The transcript stays fully typable while underlines are on. Turn them off with the Underline mistakes toggle inside the Check spelling window; your choice is remembered.

Check spelling works in 40 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. It checks the transcript in the language it is written in, worked out from the transcript itself; the Language dropdown at the top of the Check spelling window picks another, remembered for that project. Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, Filipino, Malay, Thai and Urdu have no spelling dictionary yet, so those transcripts are not checked and ScriptCut tells you spell check is currently unavailable in that language. Suggestions are ordered by how common each word is in spoken language and whether it fits the words around it, in every language except Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Swahili. Every language has its own dictionary: in Settings > Transcription, the Language dropdown at the top of Dictionary shows and edits that language's words, and Add to dictionary in the Check spelling window adds a word to the language being checked (every team member can do this). The English list's names and brands count for every language.

Find and replace

Click the magnifier (or press Cmd/Ctrl + F) to find any word, with Match case and Whole word options and next/previous arrows. Replace swaps the current match and Replace all fixes every one in a single move. On a phone, Find and replace is the first item in the Tools menu.

AI cleanup

On ProAI and Team plans, AI cleanup reads the transcript and flags production noise for you to review: setup and wrap-up chatter, crew talk, direction, filler right next to noise, and cut-off fragments. It keeps every take and every real question. The flagged lines come with a Keep all and a Remove button, and nothing is removed until you press Remove. It does not rewrite your words or fix transcription errors. An account without AI gets one free run to try it.

The Cleanup menu

The ⋯ menu in the header holds the rest of the controls:

Text size: Choose Small, Default, or Large for the transcript text.
Timecodes: Show or hide the per-row timecode.
Strip number: Show or hide the row numbers (#1, #2, …).