How to Remove Silences in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve With an EDL
Cut the pauses out of a talking-head video, tutorial or podcast automatically, then bring the cuts into Premiere Pro or Resolve as an editable timeline instead of a baked-in render.
Tightening a talking-head video by hand means blading every pause and closing every gap, hundreds of times in a long tutorial. Finding the pauses is the mechanical part, and software does it well. Deciding which cuts to keep is the editing part, and that belongs in your editor.
That is why an EDL is often better than a finished file: the cuts arrive in Premiere Pro or Resolve as a normal timeline. Every cut is still an edit point you can roll, extend or undo, and the footage is your original file, not a re-encoded copy.
1. Find the pauses
Drop the recording into the silence remover. Nothing is uploaded. Then set:
- Cut pauses longer than 0.4, 0.6, 1 or 2 seconds. 0.6 s keeps a natural rhythm; 0.4 s gives the fast jump-cut style.
- Keep around each cut 0.08, 0.15 or 0.3 seconds, so breaths and word endings survive.
- Silence is 24, 30 or 38 dB under speech. The speech level is measured from the recording itself; choose 38 dB in a noisy room, where the "silence" is never very quiet.
- Timeline frame rate: the frame rate of the sequence you will cut in.
The map shows where every cut falls and how much time it saves. Change a setting and it updates at once.
2. Bring the cuts into your editor
- Premiere Pro: File → Import, pick the .edl, and relink to your original file when asked.
- DaVinci Resolve: put the source clip in the media pool, then File → Import → Timeline → Pre-Conform EDL.
- Avid: import it through the List Tool.
The timeline starts at 01:00:00:00, the usual start for an edit, and uses non-drop-frame timecode.
3. Review the cuts that matter
Play the timeline once. A cut that clips a word means the pause setting is too tight or the silence level too strict for that speaker: raise Keep around each cut, or fix that one edit point by hand. A pause you wanted to keep for effect is one ripple edit to restore.
Other ways out
- Tightened video: the cut version rendered in your browser (MP4 in Chrome and Edge), when you don't need an editor at all.
- Tightened WAV: for podcasts, with a 5 ms crossfade at every join so there are no clicks.
- CSV: the start and end of every kept and cut range, for a spreadsheet or a script.
Pauses are only half of the tightening. The filler word remover finds the "um"s and "uh"s.
Free, no upload. Get the extension for transcripts beside YouTube and TikTok videos, or see what Pro adds.