Cut Silences (Pipeline Agent 1)

First step of the automated edit. Takes a raw recording + its word-level transcript and removes only silence: dead air before the first word and after the last word, plus inter-word pauses longer than a threshold (trimmed down to a natural breath, never a hard zero-gap). It leaves the speaker's words untouched, false starts, retakes, and stutters are the cut-mistakes agent's job (Agent 2).

This agent is deterministic and transcript-driven, so its output (*.silence-transcript.json) feeds cleanly into the next agents and the beat-sync validator.

When to use

• "cut the silences", "trim the pauses", "remove dead air", "tighten the pacing"
• As the first stage of the master edit workflow, right after transcription.

Prerequisites

A word-level transcript JSON. Either the ElevenLabs Scribe shape ({ words: [{ text, start, end, type }], audio_duration_secs }) or a generic { words: [{ text, start, end }] }. Generate one with the workspace transcriber:

node scripts/transcribe-elevenlabs.mjs path/to/raw.mp4    # -> path/to/raw.json

Usage

# 1) Plan only, compute the cut, write EDL + re-timed transcript (no video touched)
node .agents/skills/cut-silences/scripts/cut-silences.mjs <transcript.json> \
  --out-dir video-projects/<slug>/assets

# 2) With a video, also write the ffmpeg command (still does not render yet)
node .agents/skills/cut-silences/scripts/cut-silences.mjs <transcript.json> \
  --video video-projects/<slug>/assets/raw.mp4 --out-dir video-projects/<slug>/assets

# 3) Render the cut video (local ffmpeg, re-encode, A/V kept in sync)
#    add --apply to actually run ffmpeg
node .agents/skills/cut-silences/scripts/cut-silences.mjs <transcript.json> \
  --video video-projects/<slug>/assets/raw.mp4 --apply \
  --output video-projects/<slug>/assets/edited-silenced.mp4

Options