How to cut a long interview down to the best moments

The three-tool workflow

The most efficient approach to interview cutting treats three tools as a pipeline, each narrowing the material before passing it to the next stage:

You don't have to use all three steps every time. For a well-paced interview you may only need speech search and a quick review. For a rambling raw recording you'll want the full pipeline.

Step 1 - Speech search for key phrases

Open the Speech Search tool from the smart tools panel. The app runs on-device transcription using Apple's speech recognition - no audio leaves your Mac.

Search for phrases that tend to appear at the start of a strong answer: "the point is", "what really matters", "the key thing", the subject's name, a product name, or any topic-specific term you know will anchor the best content. Each match is added to the timeline as a segment, padded by a few seconds on either side so you capture the full thought.

Run multiple searches - each adds to the selection without replacing previous results. By the time you've searched for four or five phrases, the timeline often contains 80% of what you'd want anyway.

Step 2 - Remove silence

Switch to the Remove Silence tool. This analyzes the audio waveform and trims continuous stretches below a configurable dB threshold. For interview content, a threshold around −40 dB with a minimum silence duration of 1 second works well - it removes meaningful pauses without cutting natural breath between words.

After running Remove Silence, the timeline is replaced with the tightened result. If you ran Speech Search first, re-run it again afterwards to restore your key-phrase segments on top of the silence-removed timeline - or run Remove Silence first, then Speech Search to layer selections on the tighter base.

Step 3 - Review and fine-tune

Play through the timeline using the space bar. For any segment that still feels weak or out of context, click to select it on the timeline and press Delete to remove it. To trim the start or end of a segment, drag its edge on the timeline - the preview updates in real time so you can hear exactly where the cut will fall.

Segments can also be reordered by dragging them along the timeline, allowing you to restructure the narrative even if the original recording wasn't in the order you want.

Step 4 - Export

Press ⌘E to export. You can output the entire selection merged into a single file, or choose Export Segments as Separate Files to get each segment as its own clip - useful if you're handing individual answers to a motion graphics artist or posting clips separately to social media.

Because the export is lossless, the output video is bit-for-bit identical to the source at those cut points. No re-encode wait, no quality loss.

Tips for faster cutting

• Mark promising segments during playback by pressing I at the start and O at the end of a good section - you don't need to pause.
• Use the Invert button to flip your selection and quickly check what you're cutting out rather than what you're keeping.
• Jump between segments with ⌘[ and ⌘] to move rapidly through the timeline without using the mouse.
• Give segments descriptive names by double-clicking the segment label on the timeline - these names carry through to exported filenames when using separate file export.