Tune the rhythm

Max splice length, breath room, fill, and crossfade are the knobs that decide whether the cut feels punchy or natural

Out of the matcher, every cut feels a little raw. The workspace header has the controls that turn it into something you'd actually deliver. None of them touch the script; they all shape how the splices play.

Max splice length

This caps the longest run the matcher will produce in a single splice. Seven options:

• Natural: no cap, the matcher takes the longest run it can find
• Tight: 10 words max
• Tighter: 6 words
• Choppy: 4 words
• Choppier: 3 words
• Very Choppy: 2 words
• Single-word: 1 word

Tighter caps force more frequent cuts, which forces the matcher to draw from more clips. Useful for high-energy edits, useful when you want the assembly to feel like it's drawing from everywhere.

Single-word is the extreme end. Every word from a different clip if the corpus allows it. Looks like a ransom note, sounds wild, very fun in moderation.

Word boundary refinement

Out in Settings → Mosaic, every splice's start and end snap to a local audio energy minimum within fifty milliseconds. That trims off the click artifacts that come from imprecise transcript timing. It's on by default and we'd leave it on.

There's also a Precision accuracy toggle, off by default, that snaps to phoneme transitions instead. It needs a forced-alignment model on disk and it's limited to clips of thirty seconds or less. Sharper edges when it works.

Auto-dilation

Every splice can be extended by a few frames at the head and tail to give a small breath. Defaults are 0 frames each, set in Settings → Mosaic, with a per-clip head and tail pad you can tune.

Dilation is clamped, so it never pushes past the source clip's actual duration. Bumping the tail is the easiest fix when splices feel cut off mid-syllable.

Splice crossfade

Settings → Mosaic also has a Splice crossfade in frames. Default is 0, meaning off. Honest reason it's off by default: crossfades occasionally surfaced an issue in seamless playback, and we'd rather ship hard cuts that work than soft cuts that flicker. We'll re-enable defaults once the underlying composition logic is fully bedded down.

If you want crossfades anyway, set a frame count and they'll apply between adjacent splices.

Breath

Workspace header has a Breath menu: None, Tiny, Fast, Standard, High Quality. Adds inter-clip gaps with optional dissolves so the cut isn't wall-to-wall talk.

The right setting depends on the corpus. Interview footage with natural pauses can take None. Tight scripted reads need Tiny or Fast to feel human.

Fill all clips

Header toggle. Every entry's individual transform gets overridden with a fill-center transform. Drag the preview vertically to pan the fill offset live, and the change applies across the whole timeline.

Per-entry, you can set fit, fill, or none, and drag the preview to pan a fill offset that's saved on that entry. Fill offsets travel with alternates when you swap takes, which is the small detail that keeps a tuned cut from falling apart on the second pass.

The bigger lesson: tune the rhythm before you start tuning individual takes. The cut feels different at Tight vs Natural, and you don't want to nail a take only to change the splice length and rebuild it.