Footage review
DemoTake watches your recording for long stretches where nothing happens and suggests shortening each one, while keeping consent screens, results and checkpoints on screen. You accept or reject every suggestion; nothing changes until you do.
Long recordings collect dead air: a page that takes 30 seconds to load, a minute of reading a consent screen, a pause while someone finds the next button. Cutting that by hand means scrubbing through every minute. Footage review does the scrubbing for you and hands you a list of suggested cuts to approve.
It is careful by design. A still screen is a candidate, not dead air. Each suggestion shortens a stretch rather than deleting it, and nothing is ever cut across a consent screen, a result, an assertion or a checkpoint.
What counts as a still stretch
DemoTake measures how much of the picture changes over time and lines that up with what happened in the take: clicks, typing, scrolls and logged events. A stretch becomes a suggestion when:
- almost nothing on screen changes (a spinner, a blinking caret or a clock still counts as quiet),
- nobody clicks, types or scrolls, and
- it lasts at least 4 seconds.
Then DemoTake reads the text on that screen to decide how much of it to keep:
| Screen | Title in the Polish tab | What is kept |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing to read | Still screen or Waiting screen | 4 s (Keep each), ending with the last second before the screen changes |
| A lot of text | Screen with text | A little more reading time. A screen already shown earlier gets no extra time. |
| Consent ("wants access to your account") | Consent screen | Enough time to read it, up to about 8 s, flagged for you to look at |
| Result ("confirmed", "success", "booked") | Result screen | Extra time as proof, flagged for you to look at |
The final state of every scene stays on screen, and so does the time around each assertion, checkpoint and result. A suggestion quotes the text on screen only when DemoTake read it cleanly.
Review the suggestions
The editor reviews a take automatically when you open it, as long as the recording is 20 minutes or shorter. For longer takes, open the inspector's Polish tab and click Find Pauses. Framing is checked in the same pass; see Framing and Fit to Content.
8:02 Now
→
3:58 If all 31 are accepted
- Waiting screen · keeps 4.0 s−26.0 s
- Consent screen “Aurora wants access to your Google Account” · keeps 8.0 s−12.5 s
- Still screen · keeps 4.0 s−41.0 s
Kept on screen · 9
Each suggestion appears twice: as a row in the Polish tab and as a band on the timeline's Pauses track, with the part that would be removed hatched. Click either one to jump there and watch it.
- Accept shortens the stretch. The band turns green and reads Shortened.
- Reject (the × button) keeps the stretch as it is. Rejected rows collapse under Rejected.
- Restore puts the full stretch back after accepting; Reconsider returns a rejected one to pending.
- An eye icon and a dashed band mark suggestions that need a look first: consent and result screens, and anything DemoTake is less sure about.
- Accept All accepts every pending suggestion after telling you the new length. The More menu has Review Again, Reject All Pending and Reset All Decisions.
The summary at the top shows the length Now and the planned length if every pending suggestion is accepted. Change Keep each (2 to 10 s) and DemoTake reviews the take again with the new length. Protected moments are listed under Kept on screen; click one to go there.
Every decision is an ordinary edit you can undo with ⌘Z. If you re-record a scene, its old suggestions no longer apply and are hidden; run the review again for the new footage.
Footage review runs in DemoTake for Mac. In DemoTake Web, the editor's Polish tab shows the suggestions of a take synced from your Mac, so you can accept or reject them in the browser.
Edit a range by hand
Drag across the timeline's Pauses track to select part of a scene. The Selection group shows the frames where it starts and ends (click one to see it large), and offers:
- Ripple Delete: remove the range and close the gap. Keep context leaves half a second at each edge so the cut reads naturally.
- Shorten to and Shorten: keep the start and the last second, remove the middle.
- Speed up 2×, 4× or 8×.
Each button's tooltip shows how long the cut becomes. Press Esc to clear the selection.
For agents
Agents run the same review over MCP and apply a reviewed plan in one step:
- edit_suggest_cutscut plan
- take_framecheck doubtful ones
- edit_applyaccept + reject
- edit_revertif needed
edit_suggest_cuts doesn't change the video. It returns suggestions with ids, the still stretch (start, end), the part to remove (cut_start, cut_end), needs_review, the protected moments and planned_duration. Options: keep_seconds (default 4), min_static (default 4), context (seconds kept before the screen changes, default 1) and protect_readable (default true). Check any needs_review suggestion with take_frame, then apply the decisions atomically:
{
"take_id": "<take id>",
"operations": [
{ "op": "accept_suggestions", "ids": ["<id>", "<id>"] },
{ "op": "reject_suggestions", "ids": ["<id>"] }
]
}The result carries an edit_id; edit_revert undoes it. For hand-picked ranges, ripple_delete, shorten_range and set_speed work inside edit_apply too.
Where to go next
- Framing and Fit to Content: the framing checks that run with the review.
- Reviewer Packs: shortened stretches are disclosed in the manifest.
- Google OAuth verification videos: the full story behind the example above.