Select
Mark the moments that matter. This is the heart of ScriptCut.
Select is where you build your edit by reading. You mark the lines worth keeping, trim them to the exact words you want, and watch a running total tell you how long your cut will be. Nothing here changes your transcript; you are choosing, not cutting.
One click, two clicks, three
Click a line to choose how it carries forward:
- One click marks it Must have (green): the moments that are definitely in.
- Two clicks marks it Maybe (yellow): a moment worth keeping in reserve.
- Three clicks clears it.
Keep only the words you want
Do not love the whole line? Click and drag across just the words you want, and only those carry forward, trimmed to the exact frame. It is the fastest way to whittle a rambling answer down to the gold.
The running total
The timer at the top is your live runtime: the exact length of everything currently selected, accounting for any word-level trims. Click it to see three timers: All Selects (the default), Must Have (green) and Maybe (yellow), each with its sentence count. Click one to pin it: the toolbar timer then shows that total in its colour, and a small arrow marks the pinned one. On Arrange and Review the timer menu is also the filter: pick Must Have or Maybe and the page lists only those lines. On Select it filters only while Selected only (the eye) is on. The Export menu opens with an Include choice (All Selects, Must Have, Maybe) that is the same filter, so what you see is what you export.
The Selection button (the checklist icon in the toolbar) holds the bulk actions.
- Select all / Deselect all
- Mark or clear every line at once.
- Select Speaker / Deselect Speaker
- Point at it to see every speaker, then click a name to mark all of their lines Must have, or to clear all of them.
- Deselect interviewer
- Instantly clear every line spoken by whoever you tagged as the interviewer, handy for keeping just the answers.
Select a whole run at once
To grab many lines together, drag a box across them, let go, and a quick menu lets you play them, mark them all Must have or Maybe, favorite them, change their speaker, or unselect them, in one move.
Remove pauses
Removing pauses changes your edit, so it lives on Select: open the Tools menu (the grid icon in the Select toolbar) and click Remove pauses. It is ScriptCut’s version of a silence remover. It looks only at the lines you picked (Must have and Maybe) and finds every gap between words longer than a threshold you choose, 1, 1.5, 2, or 3 seconds. Each one shows as a chip: red Cut 2.4s, or click it to make it grey Keep 2.4s, and ScriptCut remembers the ones you keep. The video plays inside the window and each line has its own play button, so you can hear it before deciding. ScriptCut never cuts back to back; half a second of natural breathing room always stays. The cuts flow into Select, Arrange, Review, your exports and runtime. Cleanup always shows the recording as it is, so a transcript or subtitle file from Cleanup still lines up with your original video. A removed pause is gone from the list: run the tool again and it only shows pauses still there. To bring them back, use Reset Pauses in the line’s menu on Select, Reset All Pauses in Select’s page menu, or undo.
Notes and bookmarks
Every line has a note icon. Leave a note for yourself or your client, a direction, a question, a reminder, and it travels with that moment, even into your editor as a timeline marker. A bookmark marks your place so you can jump back to it later.
Favorite a line
Click the star icon on a row to mark it a Favorite, a hard must-keep. (Social clips have no stars and no notes; they are for the editing project.) A small yellow star badges the row, and every AI tool, Select, Story, and Clips, always keeps a Favorited line, even when trimming down to a tight target runtime. Favorites export as their own yellow marker in your timeline XML, and you can favorite several lines at once from the marquee or multi-select menu.
Who did what
Hover a Must have, Maybe, or Favorite marker to see who made that pick, you or a client on a share link, and when. This attribution travels with the project, so nothing gets lost when more than one person is reviewing.
Find and full screen
Use Find (the magnifier, or Cmd/Ctrl+F) to jump to any word in the transcript. The full-screen button gives you a distraction-free reading surface, ideal for a long first pass. Full screen is available on every editing page: Cleanup, Select, Arrange, and Review. On a phone it is the icon in the top bar, left of the three dots.
Playback options
If audio is attached, the page menu lets you choose whether playback plays all lines or highlighted only, so you can listen back to just your selection. The same menu holds View order, which reads the transcript either As arranged or Chronological. It also holds Pauses. Keep, the default, plays lines that sit next to each other in the recording as one stretch with every pause heard, exactly like your XML export, and the runtime timer counts those pauses too. Cut skips straight from one line to the next. A line that is out of order or not next to the previous one always jumps.
Hide everything you have not picked
An eye icon in the Select toolbar (desktop) toggles Hide unselected: turn it on and every line you have not marked Must have or Maybe disappears from view, so a long transcript reads back as just your cut. It only changes what you see; nothing is edited, moved, or exported differently. It never remembers your last choice, either: every time you open Select it starts showing everything, so a transcript can never appear to have gone missing because this was left on.
