Help with problems

Known issues and workarounds

Everything on this page is something Um Out currently does not do, does imperfectly, or refuses outright. Each one says why, and what to do instead. If your problem is not here, try troubleshooting or email us.

Refusals: when a tool stops before editing

Um Out would rather refuse than approximate. These are the refusals you are most likely to meet.

“Add an empty video track above your footage, then re-analyze”

Filler removal keeps your picture in place and edits audio only, and the way Premiere’s API works, it has to stage each piece against an empty video track while it does that. A single-camera sequence with only V1 occupied has no empty track to use.

Workaround: right-click the track headers, add a video track above your footage, and scan again. It can stay empty; Um Out only borrows it.

“This edit needs an empty audio track”

The same staging problem in the other direction, on the tools that insert picture. Add an empty audio track and re-run.

Silence removal refuses because of another copy of the same recording

If the same audio file also sits on a lane the edit does not own, or an untouched copy overlaps the span being rebuilt, a reinserted piece and a live clip would fight for the same region. Um Out names the lane in the refusal.

Workaround: mute or remove the duplicate lane for the pass, or narrow the timeline area so the two do not overlap. Several pieces of the same recording on the dialogue lane itself are fine — that case works.

“Operation not permitted” on macOS

macOS protects ~/Downloads, ~/Desktop and ~/Documents. The engine can see your file and still be blocked from reading it, so this is not a broken path.

Workaround: move the media to a folder outside those three, or grant the Um Out engine access under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files and Folders.

Offline or proxy-only media

Analysis reads the original source files from disk. If the media is offline, or you only have proxies, there is nothing to analyse. Reconnect the media first.

Things that work, with limits worth knowing

Undo of a silence pass is several steps, not one

Premiere cannot chain the operations a rebuild needs inside one transaction, so each rebuilt piece is its own undo step. The panel tells you how many when it finishes.

Better than undoing: leave Back up sequence before applying on in Settings. The edit lands in a copy and your original sequence is untouched, so recovering is a matter of closing a tab rather than counting keystrokes.

The backup sequence keeps Premiere’s default copy name

There is no rename action in the Premiere API, so the duplicate is named by Premiere, not by us. The panel reports the name it wanted to use.

Premiere can close during a very long rebuild

A long highlight with the quiet removed can be hundreds of separate Premiere operations, and Premiere runs scripting on one thread. Um Out now pauses regularly to let the host keep up, which removed the most likely cause — but we cannot reproduce the crash on demand, so we will not claim it is fixed.

Workaround: keep the backup-sequence setting on, and work in sections on very long recordings. If Premiere does close, the panel explains what was in progress the next time you open it.

Captions are images, not native Premiere captions

Premiere’s caption API is read-only, so Um Out renders your approved text to transparent graphics and times those on V2. The words are exactly what you reviewed, which is the point — but you cannot retype a caption in Premiere. Fix the line in the panel and create that caption again.

Variable frame rate footage

Screen recordings and phone footage are often variable frame rate. Um Out does not detect this yet and snaps to the sequence timebase, so timings can drift on long clips. Workaround: transcode to constant frame rate before editing, which is worth doing in Premiere regardless.

The first scan on a new machine is slow

Anything that reads speech — filler words, bad takes, captions, B-roll, chapters, shorts — downloads a speech model the first time. It can take several minutes and looks like nothing is happening. Later scans start immediately.

Detection: what it misses, and why

Silence: a fan or air conditioner may be protected

Steady background beds are deliberately protected so a music bed is not chopped up. That can also keep a stretch of room hum you wanted gone. Untick it in the review list — which is exactly why the review list exists.

Filler words: some are missed, and some are offered unticked

Speech models drop some fillers entirely and mis-hear others as real words. Um Out recovers what it can: a drawn-out “ummmm” is judged on what it is rather than how cleanly it was heard. Where there is a voiced sound with no transcribed word at all, it appears as an unclear speech item that starts unticked, because it could be a real word the transcriber lost.

Bad takes: a retake can be missed

Three usual reasons: too long between the two attempts, the second attempt rephrased so completely that no words match, or the line was too short (three repeated words is usually just emphasis). The tool errs toward missing one rather than proposing to delete something you meant.

B-roll only matches filenames

No stock search, no looking at the pictures. DJI_0043.mp4 will never match anything. Rename your footage.

Stream highlights: the length slider is stream time, not runtime

Asking for 15 minutes means 15 minutes of stream considered. Silence and off-topic trimming both shorten what lands on the timeline, and the review row tells you by how much.

Re-running gives the same answer on purpose — deterministic ranking is the only kind you can trust. Use Find different cuts to ask for the next-best distinct ones. That memory lives in the panel and is gone when it reloads.

Stream highlights: game titles come from a list

Speech models usually write game names in lowercase, and capitalisation is the only signal that something is a proper noun, so common titles are recognised from a list that can never be complete. An unlisted game still works whenever the transcriber capitalises it.

Clip That only hears what was transcribed

A call-out said quietly under a loud moment leaves nothing to match, and a missed one looks the same as no call-out. Add your own phrasing, one per line, if you say it a way the built-in list does not cover.

Not built yet

• Stock footage search. B-roll searches your project bin only.
• Subject tracking in shorts. The portrait crop does not follow a moving speaker.
• Importing a Premiere text style or .mogrt for captions. You can save an Um Out look on your machine; you cannot point it at a Premiere template.
• Social copy generation for shorts.
• DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, and every host that is not Premiere Pro.

Not a bug: the installer warning

Windows and macOS both warn about Um Out on first run because it is not code-signed yet. What the warning means and how to verify the file is written out on the install page.

Hit something not on this list? Tell us — and if Premiere closed unexpectedly, open Settings → Reporting a problem, press Copy diagnostics, and paste it into the email. It contains which tools ran and any error codes. It contains no transcript, no file paths and no project names, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you paste it yourself.