Clean up a talking head: pauses, false starts, captions

A talking head is the video where the transcript is the edit. You know which pause goes and which sentence is the hook. Claude reads the words and does the dragging.

You need a workspace with Claude Code open in it (see Your first cut) and one recording of you talking to camera.

Start with the words

Before asking for a cut, ask what is in the file. This costs nothing and tells you whether the analysis is good.

What does take-3.mov say? Give me the transcript with the pauses marked.

If the file has not been analysed, Claude analyses it first and tells you what it will cost. Then it prints the words with their times and the silences between them.

Read it once. You will spot the false starts and the sentence you want to open with.

Ask for the cut, specifically

Vague asks give vague cuts. Say what goes and what stays.

Make a 9:16 video called Consistency from take-3.mov. Cut every pause longer than 0.8 seconds. Remove the two false starts at the top, before "three rounds a week". Leave a little air around each cut.

Claude writes the timeline as a run of clips from the same file, each one a stretch between cuts. The app shows it at once. A 4-minute take usually becomes eight to fifteen clips.

If a cut lands mid-word, say so with the words, not the seconds:

The cut after "results" is too tight. Give it a quarter second more.

Claude knows which clip you mean because it has the transcript.

Move the hook to the front

The best line is rarely the first one recorded.

Move the clip where I say "nobody tells you this" to the start of the video.

On a magnetic track the other clips close up behind it. Nothing else moves.

Caption it

Caption it in the default style, at the bottom.

Claude fills a Subtitles track from the transcript. Bars never straddle a cut, and a speaker change ends a bar. The bar rules in Settings decide how many words go in each bar and how long one may last.

Open the Bars tab in the right panel to read them. Click a time to jump there. Fix a word inline, or ask:

In the captions, "there" at 0:42 should be "their".

Check it without watching it

Claude cannot watch the video, so it draws itself pictures. Ask for the same one it uses:

Show me a contact sheet, one frame per clip, with the captions on.

Look for a caption cut off at the bottom, or a frame where you are mid-blink at a cut. Point at the clip by what is said in it and Claude adjusts.

Export

Export it at HD, 30 fps.

The MP4 is in the video's exports folder.

Three things to know

• Captions do not follow later cuts. If you cut again after captioning, ask Claude to caption again; it replaces every bar.
• Claude cuts by words and silences. It will not notice a bad frame. You will, in a second, on the contact sheet.
• Every change is one undo in the app, including a rewrite of the whole timeline. Nothing Claude does is hard to take back.