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Clips

Cut & Trim

Mistakes happen when you record — a pause while a page loads, a wrong click, a false start. Instead of recording again, remove those parts in Clips. Cut footage stays in your project, greyed out on the timeline, so you can adjust or restore it at any time.

Click Clips in the toolbar above the video preview. Your recording opens on a timeline, where you can cut, trim, and review every edit. New to Clips? Start with the overview.

The editor with the cursor on the Clips button in the toolbar above the video preview

When the AI Script Writer generates your script, Smart Auto-Cut removes long pauses from each recording automatically. It’s on by default.

The AI Script Writer showing Smart Auto-Cut will remove long pauses

Auto-cut in the Clips toolbar detects idle moments — stretches with no mouse or keyboard activity, such as waiting for a page to load — and cuts them. Hover over Auto-cut to preview the spans it would remove; nothing changes until you click.

The Clips toolbar with the Auto-cut tooltip, Detect and cut idle moments from your video, and automatic cuts shown as hatched sections on the timeline

Treat automatic cuts as suggestions: keep the ones that tighten the pacing, and adjust or undo any that remove something viewers need to see.

  • Auto-cut only affects the clip you’re on. Other clips are unchanged.
  • Your own cuts take priority over automatic ones.
  • Auto-cut isn’t available for mobile recordings.

Drag the zoom slider, or pinch on your trackpad, to zoom in for precise edits and back out to review the whole recording.

The zoom slider at the right of the Clips toolbar, with the timeline zoomed in to a few seconds

To see more of the picture while you cut, click Hide padding above the timeline. It only changes your view — the final video keeps its padding.

  1. Move the playhead to where the cut should start.

  2. Click Cut a segment in the toolbar. The playhead position becomes the start of the cut.

    The Cut a segment button in the Clips toolbar
  3. The step bar reads Cut a segment · Click the end. Click the end point on the timeline — before or after the start both work.

    The step bar reading Cut a segment, Click the end, with a Cancel button, while the end of the cut is being placed on the timeline

The removed span turns greyed out. To stop without cutting, click Cancel or press Escape.

Shortcut: Shift + Click on the timeline to add a cut.

You can also right-click a clip on the timeline and choose Cut a segment.

The right-click menu on a clip with Rename clip, Cut a segment, Split at playhead, Change speed marked Soon, and Remove clip

Drag a cut’s start or end edge to make it shorter or longer. To restore a cut completely, hover over it and click Undo cut.

Dragging the edge of a greyed-out cut on the timeline to resize it

To restore everything that was cut — manual and automatic — click Remove cuts in the toolbar.

A trim is a cut that touches the start or end of a clip. Drag the handle at either edge of the clip inward to remove opening or closing footage.

The trim handle at the left edge of a clip on the timeline

A cut always stays inside one clip. If you click past the edge of a clip while cutting, the cut stops at the clip’s edge and becomes a trim.

Press Space or click play to watch the result. Cut footage is skipped, so you can check that every transition feels natural and nothing important was removed.