Bad-take removal and aggressiveness

What the pass is

Bad-take removal is a toggle in Cut controls, on by default. When it is on, RoughCut runs one AI editor pass over the transcript after transcription finishes and before the timeline is built.

Silence removal always runs. The editor pass is the optional stage on top of it. The app states the split on the screen itself: silence removal always runs; the AI editor pass is the optional stage.

The pass is not Pro-gated — it is part of the core app. What it does require is an AI provider key of your own, because the transcript has to be read by a model. See Choose an AI provider.

What it proposes

The editor reads the transcript with word-level timing and proposes spans to remove. Each proposal carries a category, and those categories are what you will see in Review:

Two of these deserve a note. Tangent is the category most sensitive to context — what counts as a digression depends entirely on what the video is for, which is why writing a video goal helps. Filler is the category most sensitive to taste; some speakers' rhythm depends on the small words another editor would strip.

RoughCut does not detect every bad take, and not every proposal it makes is correct. It is a rough cut: a first pass that removes the obvious, presented for your judgement. Treat the review list as a proposal from an assistant editor, not as a finished decision. Keep your originals and check the output before you rely on it.

Turning it off

Switch Bad-take removal off and you get a silence-only cut. The app's own help text on the toggle is exact:

Off = silence-only cut, no API key needed.

That is a genuinely useful mode, not a degraded one:

• No AI provider key is needed. Nothing is sent to any AI provider.
• No transcript text leaves your Mac for editing.
• No per-job AI cost.
• It is much faster, because the editor pass is skipped entirely.

The finished job records what happened, so you are never guessing later which kind of cut you are looking at. A silence-only job shows:

LLM editor: skipped — silence-only cut.

A job that ran the pass shows the provider, the model, and how many spans were proposed instead.

If you leave the toggle on but have no key saved, the job fails at preflight with an explicit message and an explicit way out:

No API key for provider '<provider>'. Add it in Settings, or disable bad-take removal for a
silence-only cut.

Bad-take aggressiveness

Bad-take aggressiveness lives inside the collapsed Fine-tune section. It has three levels:

The default is Standard. Only these three values are valid; anything else is refused with:

Aggressiveness must be conservative, standard, or aggressive.

Move one level at a time, and judge the change on the same recording. Moving from Standard to Aggressive does not make the editor more accurate — it makes it more willing to act on a weaker signal, which means more true removals and more false ones. Whether that is a good trade depends on how much reviewing you would rather do.

The review layer is the safety net

The editor pass proposes. You decide. This is the design, and it is why an imperfect pass is still useful.

Every proposed removal arrives in the review list with:

• A category, from the table above, saying why the editor wanted it gone.
• A confidence score, shown as a percentage pill. Below 70% the pill turns red and is labelled as worth a look; at or above 70% it is green. Sorting by Low confidence first puts the shakiest proposals in front of you first.
• The transcript text of the span, so you can read what would be removed without playing anything.
• Audio playback of exactly that span. One row plays at a time; press the play control on a row to hear the passage in question.
• A Keep / Remove button that says what it will do. One click flips the decision.

Two viewing modes support two different review habits. Timeline shows the cuts chronologically, so you can follow the recording as it was performed. By category groups them, so you can accept all the verbatim retakes quickly and spend your attention on the tangents. Kept Segments starts collapsed in that view because it is usually the group you do not need to read.

When you have made your changes, Recompute Cuts re-applies them and rewrites the timeline. It does not re-transcribe and does not run the AI editor again — it applies your decisions to the analysis that already exists. See Recompute cuts after review and Review the timeline.

Your source file is never edited

Nothing in this pass touches your footage. RoughCut does not transcode, re-encode, trim, or copy the original file. What the editor pass produces is a list of decisions, and what the export produces is an FCPXML that references your original media in place.

That is also why an incorrect removal costs you nothing permanent. The material is still in the file; the timeline simply does not reference it. Keep the proposal, recompute, and it comes back.

Common mistakes

• Turning the toggle off because a cut was wrong. A wrong cut is a reason to review the list or move to Conservative, not a reason to lose the pass entirely.
• Reaching for Aggressive to fix missed takes. More removals is not the same as better removals. If specific retakes are being missed, a video goal and a review pass will do more.
• Skipping the review list. The pass is designed on the assumption that you will read it. Exporting unread is where surprises come from.
• Ignoring the low-confidence sort. It puts the proposals most likely to be wrong at the top of the list, which is exactly where your attention is worth most.
• Expecting a silence-only cut to remove retakes. With the toggle off, no transcript is read by any model. Only silence goes.

Troubleshooting

For a second AI read of what survived this pass, see Use Second Look safely.