Script guidance

❓ What is it?

Script guidance turns a raw, unedited recording into a clean first cut that follows a written script.

If you record talking-head or "self-tape" style videos — reading from a script, doing several takes, stumbling over lines, and chatting between takes — you usually end up with a long clip full of retries and off-script moments. Script guidance reads your finished script, finds the parts of your footage that actually match it (in order), and builds a new timeline that contains only those parts.

You give FireCut two things:

• One source video clip (that already contains audio)

• Your script, as a plain-text .txt file

…and FireCut produces a new sequence with the off-script takes, slip-ups and retries removed.

Script guidance is in beta and the transcription is experimental, so always review the result before relying on it.

🤔 How does it work?

The feature works in four stages. Stages 1–2 are automatic; stage 3 is where you review and fine-tune; stage 4 builds the cut.

1️⃣ Transcribe your clip

Pick a video clip from your project tree (bins expand and collapse; only a single clip can be selected, not a bin), choose the Audio language, and click Transcribe.

• FireCut transcribes the whole clip using a transcription model (Scribe) chosen specifically because it handles raw footage well — repeated takes, false starts, and filler don't throw it off.

• Transcripts are saved and reused. If you've already transcribed a clip, the button reads Load transcript and the transcript opens instantly instead of being re-generated. Clips that already have a transcript show a captions icon in the tree. This means you can iterate on your script and settings as much as you like without ever re-transcribing.

• Maximum clip length is 30 minutes.

2️⃣ Map your script to the transcript

Provide your script in the Script panel (left). If it's empty, click "Missing script → Click here to open a script" to import a .txt file (up to 30,000 characters). FireCut then matches your script against the transcript and color-codes the matched sections across both panels — Script on the left, Video transcript on the right.

The matcher is deliberately tolerant so it survives real-world recordings:

• Small misspeaks and transcription errors still match (fuzzy matching at the word and phrase level).

• Numbers and their words are treated as equal — 2 matches "two", 21 matches "twenty-one".

• Common symbols match their spoken form — "and" ↔ &, "percent" ↔ %, "dollars" ↔ $, "at" ↔ @, "plus" ↔ +, and so on.

• Off-script content is ignored. Anything you said that isn't in the script — retries, "okay, let me do that again", ums — simply never gets claimed by a section, so it's left out of the final cut. Script lines you never actually said are skipped too.

• Repeated lines resolve to one occurrence. FireCut scans top-to-bottom and keeps the first good take of a repeated line (and, with Align to sentences on, snaps it to clean sentence edges).

3️⃣ Review and edit the mapping

This panel is the heart of the feature — see Reviewing & editing the mapping below. Matched sections are color-coded; hovering a section highlights and scrolls to its counterpart in the other panel.

4️⃣ Create the timeline

Click Create timeline. FireCut:

• Creates a brand-new sequence named "FireCut Script - {your clip name}" (in a Script sub-bin) built from your source clip. Your original sequence is left completely untouched.

• Keeps only the matched sections and removes everything else — the unmatched parts are cut out and the gaps closed (a ripple delete, the same mechanism as silence removal), not just muted or disabled.

• If your matched sections already cover the whole clip, it tells you "Script timeline created (no cuts required)" and still creates the sequence.

The result is your original clip reduced to just the parts that correspond to your script, in order — a starting point you can refine further in Premiere.

✏️ Reviewing & editing the mapping

Before you create the timeline, you have full manual control over what gets kept. Everything below lives on the results screen.

• Edit the script — the Script panel is directly editable. As you type, FireCut re-maps automatically. Use Clear to wipe the script and start over.

• Adjust a selection — hover over a colored section in the transcript and drag the chevron handles on its edges to grow or shrink what's included.

• Add a section — drag-select across un-highlighted transcript text to force-keep a portion that wasn't matched automatically (useful for an ad-lib you want to keep).

• Delete a section — right-click a section and choose Delete section.

• Re-run mapping — recompute the automatic mapping from scratch.

Heads up — manual edits "freeze" the mapping. The moment you adjust, add, or delete a transcript selection, FireCut stops auto-remapping so it won't overwrite your work. The status changes from "✓ Mapped" to a yellow "✎ Edited", and a Re-run mapping button appears. While frozen, editing the script text saves it but no longer remaps. Clicking Re-run mapping recomputes from the script and discards your manual transcript edits (you'll be asked to confirm: "Re-running the mapping will discard your manual transcript edits. Continue?").

⚙️ Settings

Transcription

• Source clip — the single video clip to transcribe. Expand bins to find it; only clips (not bins) can be selected. One clip at a time.

• Audio language — set this to the language of your audio. This is an experimental setting and currently supports left-to-right languages only (right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew aren't available yet).

Mapping controls

Open these with the sliders icon next to Mapping. Changing any of them re-maps live (after a short pause), and each has a reset (↺) button.

• Minimum match length (default 5; range 1–20) — how many words in a row must agree before a chunk counts as a match. Higher → fewer, more confident matches. Lower → more (and shorter) matches, but more false positives.

• Fuzzy matching word factor (default 50%; range 0–75%) — how different two single words can be while still counting as the same word. Higher → more forgiving of mis-transcriptions. Lower → stricter.

• Fuzzy matching phrase factor (default 20%; range 0–75%) — when a single word fails to match, FireCut looks ahead and compares short phrases instead; this controls how different those phrases can be. Higher → bridges bigger gaps across errors.

• Fuzzy matching phrase length (default 50; range 10–250) — how many characters of look-ahead the phrase comparison uses.

• Align to sentences (default on) — snaps section boundaries to sentence endings where possible. Especially helpful around repeated lines.

Timeline controls

Open these with the sliders icon next to Timeline. These control the cut, and are applied when you click Create timeline (they don't change the on-screen mapping).

• Section edge padding (default 0.6s; range 0.1–5s) — extra time kept before and after each matched section so cuts have breathing room. Higher → looser cuts with more around each section. Lower → tighter cuts.

• Remove pauses longer than (default 1.0s; range 0.1–5s) — trims long silent gaps inside a kept section. Lower → tighter (removes shorter pauses too). Higher → keeps longer in-section pauses.

Together, Section edge padding and Remove pauses longer than act as your "cut tightness" controls.

💡 Tips for best outcomes

• Use clean audio. Mute background music and sound effects, and keep speech clear — the cleaner the transcript, the better the matches.

• Match your script to what you actually said. The closer the script wording is to your spoken words, the more reliably it maps. If a take drifted from the script, either loosen the fuzzy settings or tweak the script/transcript text.

• Keep your script in spoken order. FireCut scans top-to-bottom and matches the first good occurrence within range, so large re-orderings can confuse it.

• Iterate freely. The transcript is saved after the first run, so adjusting your script and the mapping sliders never re-transcribes. Tweak, watch the highlights update, then create the timeline.

• Fine-tune by hand when needed. Drag the section handles or force-keep a selection rather than fighting the sliders for one stubborn section.

• Treat the output as a first cut. It's a fast starting point; do your final trims in Premiere.

🙋‍♂️ Common questions, issues, watch-outs

• "A good take or line is missing from the cut" → Loosen the matching: lower Minimum match length, or raise Fuzzy matching word factor / phrase factor. Also check that your script wording matches what you actually said. As a last resort, drag-select that part of the transcript to force-keep it.

• "It kept the wrong take of a line I repeated" → Drag the section's handles to move the selection, or Delete section and force-keep the take you want. Keeping Align to sentences on usually helps repeated lines snap to clean boundaries.

• "The cuts feel too tight / words get clipped" → Raise Section edge padding.

• "Long pauses are left in the cut" → Lower Remove pauses longer than.

• "I edited the transcript and now editing the script does nothing" → Manual transcript edits freeze the mapping so they aren't overwritten. Click Re-run mapping to return to automatic mapping — note this discards your manual transcript edits.

• "My language isn't in the list" → Script guidance currently supports left-to-right languages only. Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) aren't supported yet.

• "My clip is too long" / "I have multiple source clips" → Clips are limited to 30 minutes, and the feature works on one clip at a time — multiple or joined source media aren't supported yet.

• "Will this change my original sequence?" → No. Create timeline builds a separate new sequence ("FireCut Script - …"). Your original is untouched. The unmatched parts in the new sequence are removed (ripple-deleted), not just disabled.

• "The transcript has mistakes" → Because audio is transcribed automatically (and non-English is experimental), some errors are expected — fuzzy matching is designed to tolerate them. If the transcript is badly off, make sure the audio is clear and free of long silences; if it persists, share your audio with us at [e-mail].