Save Time with Text-Based Video Editing

Text-based video editing saves you a lot of time with certain video editing tasks like the A-Roll cut. While it's not useful along the entire editing workflow (think color grading or EQing the audio), it tremendously helps with tasks like identifying and removing repeated takes or filler words.

With the right editor, it also makes cutting out silences a breeze.

The tedious A-Roll cut

Because cutting the main footage is very much not a breeze.

Hours of work in a classic video editor like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, or DaVinci Resolve, nose one inch from the screen, eyes glued to the audio wave form, trying to catch the right cut point between two words, to get rid of all those stumbles, repetitions, and other mumbling.

But what used to be hours has now become a mere few clicks with your mouse. Because, like we said, with the right video editor, it makes cutting your video a breeze.

Editing your video like a text document

Flowtapes is such a “right editor”: it provides you with the text representation of the video's transcript including all silences longer than one second. Based on that, you can remove or add back in any passages in the video, essentially cutting your video by editing a text document.

Flowtapes offers a simple, intuitive interface for that, either allowing you to cut the entire sentence by hovering over it with your mouse and clicking the scissor icon, or allowing you to highlight any given text passage and removing that one by a spirited tap of your index finger.

With this interface, cutting 35 minutes of raw footage into an eight-minute long video takes like 10 minutes. What used to take me 3-4 hours before. And those numbers stem from my own experience. I use Flowtapes for every video on my channel.

Automated video editing first

But even better is: Flowtapes is a fully automatic video editor.

Meaning that it first processes the entire edit of your video, including doing the A-Roll cut, so removing silences, repetitions of messed up takes, stage directions etc. but also including effects like background music, zoom jump cuts, and a nice little artistic-vibe color grading.

This edit is potentially already the final edit of your video, ready to be published. But not always can the AI processing identify the one occurrence of multiple repetitions that also you want to keep in the video.

This is because the processing is only based on the context but doesn't check in which repetition your voice sounds better, or the joke is delivered more tightly.

And for this case, Flowtapes offers the manual, text-based video editing view.

Manual text-based editing to revise

The advantage here is that the automatic pipeline has already processed the transcript in such a way that all passages that are not removed form a coherent, continuous and correct flow of speech.

So you don't need to start from zero, highlighting all passages you want to remove. You only need to revise the automatic cut done by Flowtapes. And this takes much less time.

For my video on how I tried to define my YouTube niche, the raw recording was 15 something minutes, and contained a lot of stumbles because i went off script a couple of times. With a lot of similar repetitions of one sentence, the automatic editing did not always select the right one, so I had to revise quite a bit here. But still, with the final video being 6:47 long, this process would have taken me hours in DaVinci Resolve.

So all in all, with those great AI-driven techniques of transcribing the video, processing the transcript using NLP (natural language processing) techniques, and proving a great interface around all that, you can suddenly turn the exhausting work of editing into a fun, short activity where you only give instructions but the heavy work is done for you.

What to do with all the saved time?

With those hours that you would have normally spent on doing the A-Roll cut of your video, you can now do a lot of other activities, those that actually bring you forward.

When you're a YouTube creator, you can already start writing the next script while Flowtapes is editing your video.

Or polish the thumbnail, adding a few shadows to increase their depth.

Or you can go, make yourself a tea or coffee and take a little break, thinking about how awesome the world is, how awesome you are, and how awesome it is that you're creating this video.