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02Upload a recording

Drag a file onto the drop zone on the home page, or press Choose a file. You do not need an account to start.

1. Drop an mp4, mov, mkv, webm, mp3, m4a or wav onto the page.
2. Wait while it transcribes. A ten-minute recording takes well under a minute.
3. The editor opens with the words on the right and the picture on the left.

03Try it without a file

On the home page, press Open the editor on a sample. It loads a short recording that is already transcribed, so you can select a sentence, change the shape and press export without uploading anything of your own. It costs nothing and uses none of your allowance.

04Pick a sentence, get that clip

Drag across the words you want. Two round grips appear at each end; drag those to nudge the edges a word at a time. The bar at the foot of the screen shows how long the clip is and what it will be called. Then press Export: set up and download your clip.

1. Drag across the words. Shift-drag adds a second part.
2. Nudge either end with the grips until it starts and ends where you want.
3. Press Export, choose a shape, and download.

05Several parts as one clip

Add passages and export them as one clip. Select the first part, press + Add passage, then select the next. Each one is banked, and export stitches them together in order into a single file. Shift-drag in the transcript is the shortcut for adding one.

06Best takes, done for you

If you said a line, stumbled, and said it again through a whole recording: keep the last clean take of each line, drop the rest. Press Best takes in the Passages panel and it reads through the recording, finds the lines you retook, keeps the last clean attempt at each, and throws out the false starts, the fluffs and the filler.

It does not cut anything on its own. It fills the Passages queue with what it kept, in order, and you review it there before you export. Drop a passage, or add one it missed. It runs on the recording as it sits, at any length, and needs no upload and no waiting.

On Pro it goes further: it also catches the times you reworded a line rather than repeating it, and picks the cleanest take rather than simply the last. On the free plan it works from the words alone, which catches a repeated line but not a reworded one.

07Paste timestamps in bulk

If you already have the times, from notes or a producer’s list, open the cut list and paste timestamps to cut in bulk. Each line becomes its own clip, so a page of times turns into a page of clips in one pass.

08Shapes, bars, blur and crop

A clip can go out wide (16:9), square (1:1) or tall (9:16) for a phone. When the new shape is narrower than the video, you choose what happens to the edges: coloured bars, a blurred fill, or a crop. Crop trims to the new shape. Drag the frame on the picture to choose which part of the image is kept.

09Captions, and burning them in

Captions are the words on screen. Where the words sit. Drag them on the picture to place the caption box; choose the colour; and turn on burning-in so the words are part of the exported video rather than a separate file. What you see on the picture is what the export draws.

10Fix a word

If a word came through wrong, click it and change it to what was actually said. The fix reaches the clip name, the captions and any write-up.

11Search the exact words

Press / or open the search box to find the exact words themselves. Type a phrase and the matches light up in the transcript; the up and down arrows jump between them. It matches the words you typed and nothing else.

12Jump by describing it

When you do not remember the words but you remember the moment, use describe: jump to a part by describing it. “Where they talk about the budget” takes you there, even if nobody said the word “budget”.

13Chapters: jump to any part

Chapters break a long recording into labelled sections. Jump to any part of the recording without scrubbing. They are worked out from the talk itself and listed beside the transcript.

14Who said what

On a recording with more than one voice, speakers find who is speaking and mark each turn, so the transcript reads as a conversation. You can rename each speaker once and the name is used throughout. Speakers is a Pro feature.

15Ask about what was said

Ask answers a question about what was said, from the transcript, and shows the part it came from.

16Highlights, cut for you

Highlights are short clips from the best moments, cut for you when a recording is uploaded, so you have something to post before you have watched the whole thing. Each one opens in the editor where you can trim or reshape it.

17Reshape

Already have a clip and need it in a different shape? Reshape it: give it the shape its home wants, without cutting it again. Tall for a phone feed, square for a grid.

18Write-ups

Write-ups turn the talk into notes or a caption: notes to paste into a doc, or a caption to post with the clip.

19Read in another language

Read in another language gives you the transcript and its subtitles in a language you pick, so a Spanish reader can follow an English talk and export subtitles in Spanish. It is a Pro feature.

20Dub

Dub adds a voice reading the transcript over the clip, in the language you read in, so the export can speak to an audience that does not read the original. It is a Pro feature.

21Your dashboard

The dashboard is everything you have uploaded: your recordings with their covers and countdowns, the week’s activity, the highlights worth clipping, and the clips you have already made, each of which you can cut again while its recording is still there. There is also a search across every word in everything you own.

22When recordings are deleted

Expiry is when this recording is deleted. Recordings are removed on a timer, and nothing of yours sits on the server forever: signed out it is thirty minutes, on the free plan a day, on Pro a week and on MAX a month. The countdown is on every card on your dashboard and at the top of the editor, so it is never a surprise.

23Free and Pro

On the free plan, a single file can be up to 45 minutes and you get four hours of transcription a week; recordings are kept a day. Pro raises the file limit to four hours and the weekly allowance to twelve hours, keeps recordings a week, and turns on speakers, reading in another language and dubbing. You can change the shape, add captions, search and make clips on either plan.