One of the laborious tasks about editing interviews to camera is having to deal with the 'umms' and 'errs' that naturally occur in 99% of interviews.

in many cases the trick used to hide all those blemishes is to cut B roll into the interview so that edits to the picture to account for these audio edits can be hidden.

However whilst editing a video interview today I stumbled across a little bit of magic when dealing with some 'umms' on an interview. I went through and marked the umms in the audio timeline ready to either do magic edits or use B roll to cover them up. However I hit play in final cut in error and watched the interview play with the ummm muted and lo and behold you couldn't see that the umm had been removed, partly because for a lot of people making the umm sound does not create any facial expression. Even better the music bed masked the fact that there was silence, if not then I would have had to add room noise to mask the silence.

I called Mike and sent him over the before and after and he too could not believe his eyes, the umms were gone in the audio but undetectable even to someone looking for them.

I can't show you the actual job I was working on as it's currently under NDA, but here's a segment of Paul Drew being interviewed with the before and after, the original has 3 umms in it, with the 3rd being a particularly long one, but even knowing that one is there it is amazing how little one notices the audio being muted and we are looking at the before and after... magic!

Try it yourself, its a very cool trick you may find useful when editing the audio on an interview.