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Comment by JadoJodo | Hacker News Reader

First thought: This is really great! Based on the amount of YouTubers that I see do this to their videos, I can imagine this would be a really great tool, and I think it's awesome that you made it, OP.

Second thought: Is anyone else really annoyed by the constant cuts in videos these days? I find it distracting at times and completely jarring in others. I've never made a video for consumption, so I could imagine there are a lot of "re-takes" + cutting out of "umms", but I just find it a bit sad that everything has to be SO clean-cut these days.

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>Is anyone else really annoyed by the constant cuts in videos these days? [...], so I could imagine there are a lot of "re-takes" + cutting out of "umms"

I agree it's jarring but I understand why it often happens: it's easier and faster to fix a vocal mistake by backing up just a sentence or two and then re-record from there. So it's not always just removing the pauses; he/she actually fixed a speech mistake in that sentence and had to splice it in.

The alternative to avoid jarring cuts is to record longer takes of reading paragraph-length word counts without a mistake. This is much more difficult and time-consuming. So if you're trying to speak 10 good sentences and you flub sentence #10, you have to start all over at sentence #1 to maintain one continuous take. Otherwise, you'd have a jarring cut between sentence #9 and #10. E.g. you can see the bloopers outtakes at the end of each Technology Connections video to see that even reading from a script without mistakes is not easy.

Jump cuts, as they're called, can also be covered over by judicious use of b-roll and other supporting material.

But again, like longer reads, it takes more time/work. So a lot of channels just leave the raw jump cuts.

The other way to do this is to move to another camera angle which hides the cuts, although you certainly don't want to do this if the cuts are very short like the ones in the example on teh website. Recording 4k footage you can cut multiple HD "angles" out of it, eg zooms which you can use instead of multiple cameras.

And by pre-splicing with this software it is telling you where to put the b-roll in, saving loads of time!

Thanks! And yeah! It sounds super unnatural when even the tiniest pauses are cut out. Obvs I can’t prevent anyone from using it that way, but I set the defaults to leave a good 1/2 second of space on either side of each cut, and to leave in any silent chunks that are around 1/2sec or so.

Personally I think of the silence as a heuristic - it’s the gap between re-takes, so if I cut at those points and then delete the bad takes, it saves a ton of time.

This makes me think an interesting workflow to support might be something like, set the settings tight to get all the cuts, then delete the bad takes, then bring the pauses back.

I like the idea of cutting out silence, but editors need to understand that we need a bit of a gap in order to consume the content. I feel like I'm listening to a 10 year old with ADHD when you cut out literally any pause whatsoever.

As a person with ADHD: I get very easily distracted if the tempo of a video is low. I use the “Video Speed Controller” browser extension to run most videos at 1.5 to 2x speed.

Recut lets you configure that with a little slider

I've seen 30-second videos with a cut after each sentence. It's incredibly jarring.

If you can't give a 30-second spiel in one cut, then you keep trying until you do. Alternatively, you splice in some other graphic or video to hide when a cut happens.

Alternatively, you just edit out the silences. What's the problem?

From what I’ve seen and experienced myself, there’s a definite learning curve to making videos.

In the beginning I remember it being maddeningly hard to even get 10 seconds out without messing it up. But then also, there’s a technique and a skill to getting the cuts to sound natural.

I’ve seen plenty of YouTubers who cut after every sentence and make it sound & look natural, but plenty more who cut the same amount and it looks jarring. Keeping your head in the same spot helps. Trying to speak one full thought at a time helps too.

The worst is when you get on a roll, get 30 seconds into your roll, and then completely lose it and can’t remember where to “roll back” to.

30 seconds is too long for a shot. You lose the audience after 15 seconds, especially if it's just a talking head. Imagine you're standing in front of me as I tell you all this - you're not looking right at my face, looking me right in the eye for the 15 seconds or so it took to get to this point. You're looking away. You look over my shoulder at the thing behind me, you look at the editing equipment on the table, maybe look at what's on my screen. We're up around 25 seconds now, and your gaze has shifted at least half a dozen times.

In video editing you mimic this by cutting away to other angles, or to illustrative shots. Right around the end of the first sentence I cut to a longer "two-shot" showing us talking. At "to get to this point" I cut to a head-and-shoulders shot of you nodding in agreement (a "noddy shot", done after my piece to camera, getting you to look at the right height to match my eyeline). On "you're looking away" I cut back to me, and then a shot of my PC on the bench with some editing software open (bonus points for having it showing an earlier shot from this). On "and your gaze", it's back to me.

What you were actually looking at was cutting back and forth wildly, showing you something different every five to ten seconds, but somehow you didn't even see it move.

Reading your reply I immediately thought of a video I watched last week that would have been a good 10 minute video, probably a great 5 minute video, but was in reality a 25 minute "stream of consciousness" video. Every step in the process he described ~3 times, some of them were because he was waiting for a long running process to complete, some I think were just habit?

Much of YouTube is dealing with people who leave your video after a minute or two, so shorter is generally better.

I very much appreciate people who put the time into getting rid of the superfluous in their videos. One of my highest performing videos is a 26 second "how to" video, the majority of comments are "Thank you for not making this a 5 minute videos like the others on this topic". (Removing the riving knife from a DeWalt table saw, FYI).

I recently experimented going entirely the other way, probably went too much so. Can I teach using the Python Typer (CLI argument parsing) library in 60 seconds? Feedback from friends is "Man, that's DENSE!" https://youtu.be/1iO7wqnC7qw

They might be referring more to the tiny font size than the pacing of the video.

They didn't mention font size ("moved a little fast" was a comment for example), but I appreciated that you did. :-)

As did my early viewers for me :)

I don't know. I have ADHD and I can't watch a slow paced video (unless there is some sort of tension built in that gets brain cogs spinning). I often watch videos at 2x speed and I wish YouTube had an option for 4x.

If there are any pauses I quickly lose interest and go on doing something else and forgetting I even started watching something.

I understand small time creators with lots of cuts. They’re getting by on pretty small ad revenue and are amateurs not seasoned performers. The time and talent to have long takes without mistakes is hard, and I appreciate the content more than I want super polished production values.

>Is anyone else really annoyed by the constant cuts in videos these days I was initially but my brain has just accepted it as part of videos these days, I barely notice anymore unless it's really jarring, or done somewhere that doesn't make sense.

> but I just find it a bit sad that everything has to be SO clean-cut these days.

It's not "clean-cut" though. Jump cuts in pieces to camera look absolutely shite.

If you want to cut a bit out for pacing or to remove an "uhm uh <cough> so uh" then you cut away to something else. Maybe a close-up of what you're talking about, or to another camera angle.

Just chopping a bit out so you hop about the screen looks amateurish as all hell.

Yeah one subtle detail I really like about RedLetterMedia is that they'll have these cuts that last juuust a little longer than normal. It gives a nice punctuation to the video that feels almost classical in form.

The difference between them and most YouTubers is that they came at it backwards—they understood video production before they became YouTubers.

I’m old. It bothered me at first, but now I view it as a service to the listener. Somehow I got used to the abruptness fairly fast and then became addicted to the brevity.

Some really well done channels are unwatchable for me due to this in tangent with using an audio compressor wrong (attack set way too long) makes it even worse from pumping.

There is already an ffmpeg command line option for this, I thought. ffmpeg -af silenceremove=whatever.

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