remove-pauses-from-track

name	remove-pauses-from-track
description	Use when asked to remove pauses, silences, or dead air from a specific track in a Premiere Pro sequence, e.g. "remove the pauses from the narration track" or "cut the silences out of audio track 2 (and keep the camera video in sync)". Also use when a linked video track must stay frame-aligned with the audio track being cleaned up.

/remove-pauses-from-track

Detects and ripple-deletes silent pauses from one audio track in a Premiere Pro sequence — and, if that audio is paired with a video track (e.g. narration synced to camera footage), applies the exact same cuts to that video track too, so the two stay in sync. Destructive: verify on a duplicate/throwaway sequence before running on real footage — there is no automated undo-grouping for the batch of cuts (each is its own undo step in Premiere).

Before running

Identify from context (or ask if ambiguous):

• The sequence name (or confirm the active sequence is the right one).
• The audio track index (0-based, e.g. 0 = Audio 1) to clean up.
• Whether that audio is linked to a video track, and if so, its index (0-based, e.g. 0 = Video 1). There's no auto-detection of "linked" tracks — state it explicitly, or omit if the audio track has no corresponding video (e.g. a pure narration/VO track).

Call premiere-cli get-project-info to confirm the sequence exists (in the currently active project) and read its frameRate — needed for step 2 below.

Running the pipeline

1. Export the track's audio (always the entire sequence — no --start-seconds/--end-seconds — so the exported file's time 0 is exactly the sequence's time 0, with no offset math needed later):

   premiere-cli extract-audio-track --sequence-name "<name>" \
     --audio-track-index <N> --format wav --output /tmp/<name>-track<N>.wav
   

2. Detect pauses, passing the sequence's actual fps (from get-project-info above) so the cut list's frame quantization matches what remove-track-intervals will independently re-derive from the sequence itself — these must agree for the frame numbers to mean the same thing on both sides:

   remove-pauses /tmp/<name>-track<N>.wav --aggressiveness 1.0 \
     --min-pause 10 --fps <actual fps> -o /tmp/<name>-track<N>.cuts.txt
   

   (--aggressiveness 1.0 cuts tight to both edges of each pause; --min-pause 10 cuts pauses as short as 10ms — these are this skill's defaults, not remove-pauses's own CLI defaults, which are more conservative.)

   Most cuts are gated to word-gaps Claude judges to be phrase or sentence boundaries, so a mid-thought hesitation is not clipped. On top of that, any silence of 1 s or longer is cut wherever it falls — past a point a pause is not hesitation, it is dead air. Change that threshold with --always-cut <seconds>, or --always-cut 0 to gate strictly on boundaries.

3. Apply the cuts:

   premiere-cli remove-track-intervals --sequence-name "<name>" \
     --audio-track-index <N> [--video-track-index <M> ...] \
     --intervals-file /tmp/<name>-track<N>.cuts.txt
   

4. Check for dead air left behind. Extract the resulting track and look for silence the pass should have removed:

   premiere-cli extract-audio-track --sequence-name "<name>" \
     --audio-track-index <N> --format wav --output /tmp/<name>-after.wav
   

   Then, in the premiere-pro env:

   from premiere_ai.remove_pauses import _detect_silence
   silence, duration = _detect_silence("/tmp/<name>-after.wav")
   print(sum(b - a for a, b in silence), "s of silence in", duration, "s")
   

   A little is expected — cuts are frame-quantised and every kept pause at a boundary counts. Seconds of it, or any single stretch over ~2 s, means something is being missed; report it rather than leaving it.

5. Report the result in plain language — how many intervals were applied, how many segments removed, and any warnings from the result (a track where a segment couldn't be removed is surfaced, not silently dropped — the rest of the cuts still succeed).

6. Clean up the temporary files (.wav, .words.json, .txt, .cuts.txt) created along the way.

Notes

• remove-pauses requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (used for its Claude phrase/sentence-boundary detection step) — if it's missing, remove-pauses itself reports a clear error; nothing special needs to be done here.
• Full flag reference for either underlying command: premiere-cli extract-audio-track --help-equivalent is the extract-audio-track section of the premiere-cli skill; remove-pauses --help for the pause-detection flags; remove-track-intervals section of the premiere-cli skill for the apply step.