On average it takes between 30 to 60 minutes of editing time for every 1 minute of finished video. And about a quarter of that editing time is spent on just the initial pass.

It’s a familiar slog: play back the video, pause every few seconds to clip out a flubbed word or false start between takes, rinse and repeat. This work is the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of the editing world—it has to get done but steals time away from higher-leverage creative work. And it's one of the first things video editors wish they could speed up in their day-to-day workflow.

Our mission at Kapwing is to help creative teams make better content in less time. Today, we're thrilled to release a new AI-powered product that speeds up the most tedious parts of your editing process, so you can get back to what matters.

Trim with Transcript: Edit videos like a text document

Trim with Transcript allows you to generate an editable transcript of any video in a few clicks. No more scrubbing through all of your footage over and over to edit out bad takes. Now, just skim your transcript to find those outtakes and edit them just like a Google Doc. Highlight and hit delete—you're done.

Too often, "smart tools" flex their tech specs without materially improving your day-to-day work. Trim with Transcript is built with your team's workflow in mind, and we believe it will dramatically reduce the time spent on editing rough cuts. And it all fits with Kapwing's principle of Suggestive AI, where you control the creative direction of a video and AI helps you realize it.

Here’s how it works: Kapwing AI turns your video or audio into a fast, accurate transcript but leaves you with full control over where and what you trim out. Then, that same AI maps your edits in the transcript onto the corresponding layers in the timeline.

Since Trim with Transcript is built into our full-featured, browser-based editor, you can move right from rough cut into the rest of your edits with our host of video production tools.

Smarter together: A powerful suite of tools for video creation

Trim with Transcript joins our lineup of AI-enhanced smart tools that help make creative teams faster and more nimble. And while Trim with Transcript is powerful on its own, it works even better when paired with the rest of Kapwing's video editing platform.

Trim with Transcript works seamlessly with tools like Smart Cut, which automatically removes unwanted silences from video and audio files. Use Smart Cut to cut awkward silences in a single click, then apply Trim with Transcript to fine-tune the rest of your footage for video and audio content that's tightly edited and ready to catch (and keep) a viewer's attention.

No more awkward pauses, no more repeat words, no more hunching over your keyboard and listening back to the same five minutes of footage for hours.

And if your newly edited video needs automatic subtitles, audio cleaning, background removal, or other final polish, Kapwing's existing AI-powered features are ready to help.

Speed up your editing without sacrificing creativity

Automating and optimizing the video editing process is tricky because video creation is inherently, well, creative. Automate too many steps and you start to lose innovation. Automate too few and you’re stuck with repetitive, low-value tasks that cost hours of editing time. Trim with Transcript, and the rest of Kapwing AI, helps you find a solid middle ground.

We believe that the best smart tools for video are powered by Suggestive AI—giving you more creative freedom, not less. Our family of smart tools are designed to speed up manual tasks, so you can get back to focusing on the creative elements of video production.

Whatever you’re making, make it better and faster using Trim with Transcript.

Check out our online video trimmer to split videos with your transcript.

Related tools: Audio to Text Converter