Resolve Tighten Recording

Turns one long raw take into a tightened variant timeline. The variant is the deliverable; the original timeline is never touched.

Everything below was measured live against Resolve Studio 21.0.1.11 / MCP v2.80.1 on 2026-08-06, on a real 28.5-minute 30fps screen recording, unless a different date is given.

The deliverable contract

Deliver a tightened variant timeline, plan → review → confirm. Do not grade, caption, or add anything; a tighten is pure subtraction. The variant runs generous on purpose, recovering over-cut material is slow and invisible, trimming further is fast and visible.

Two things always go back to the editor with the variant:

• The largest lifts. A lift is only silence to the microphone. Measured on real material (2026-07-31): a 29s lift was 70% silent on-screen demonstration, real content, cut because nobody spoke over it. Anything over ~15s deserves a human look before the variant is trusted.
• What silence-driven tightening cannot hear, see the last section.

Workflow

1. Lift the analysis caps for long media, media_analysis set_caps_preset {preset: "unlimited"}. The standard preset carries a 90-second wall clock; multi-hour material dies on it. Restore standard when done (step 7).
2. Transcribe, media_analysis start_batch_job with {clip_id, vision: false, transcription: {enabled: true, ...}}, then run_batch_job_slice {job_id}. Two traps in one call pair:
   • Batch jobs do not advance themselves. start_batch_job returns a durable job in queued and nothing runs until a slice call drives it.
   • run_batch_job_slice blocks until the slice completes, budget roughly 4-7x realtime for local whisper (measured: 28.5min of Chinese speech in 5m14s via mlx_whisper) and run it from a background process, not the main conversation.