Scrubbing through dead air by hand is one of those editing tasks that eats 20 minutes a session and feels like it should've been automated years ago. DeadAir is a free Premiere panel that does it for you. No subscription, no account, nothing outside Premiere.
Point it at your timeline, set a threshold (or let it figure one out), and it finds quiet regions from the audio waveform. Remove them and close the gaps, remove them while preserving timeline timing, disable them, or add markers for review. A/V sync stays aligned across multiple tracks.
Premiere's built-in pause removal is transcript-based and is usually the right choice for spoken dialogue. DeadAir is for amplitude-based work: low-level noises, untranscribed audio, music or effects, isolated tracks, older Premiere versions, and workflows that need precise dB control.
- Adjustable silence threshold (-100 dB to -10 dB), with slider and exact numeric input
- Auto-detect threshold: samples up to 3 clips, figures out your noise floor vs. speech level, and picks a starting threshold for you
- Minimum duration control (0.1 s to 5.0 s) so brief dips don't count
- Padding (0-500 ms) to keep a buffer around speech
- Four timeline actions: Close Gaps, Leave Gaps, Disable, and Markers Only
- Analyze a specific audio track or all tracks at once
- Settings persist between sessions
- In-panel debug console so you can see exactly what's happening
Works with Premiere Pro 2019+ (v13.0 and up, Windows and macOS).
DeadAir reads audio directly inside the browser panel using the Web Audio API, no plugins needed:
- Audio-only clips (WAV, MP3, AIFF, AAC) under 150 MB are loaded directly via the Node.js
fsmodule. - Video clips (MOV, MP4, MXF, R3D, BRAW, etc.) get their audio extracted by FFmpeg into an in-memory mono 22 050 Hz WAV pipe. No temp files.
- The raw PCM is decoded with
AudioContext.decodeAudioData(). - Silence detection scans 50 ms windows, takes the peak amplitude in each, and compares it against your threshold.
FFmpeg is optional. Pure audio projects work without it.
Click Auto and DeadAir will:
- Scan up to the first 3 clips (60 s each)
- Build a histogram of per-window dB values
- Set the 5th percentile as the noise floor and 70th percentile as the speech level
- Suggest a threshold at
noise_floor + 30% x (speech - noise_floor), clamped to -95 dB to -15 dB
It's a reasonable starting point. You'll probably still want to adjust it.
Premiere's built-in ripple delete shifts clip positions after every removal. On a single track that's fine. With multiple tracks it causes A/V desync because each track shifts independently.
DeadAir works around this with two phases:
Phase 1 - remove without ripple
- Razors all clips at silence boundaries across all tracks simultaneously (via QE DOM)
- Collects references to every resulting silence clip
- Calls the documented
clip.remove(false, false)API on all of them at once, which removes clips without shifting positions and leaves exact-size gaps - Leave Gaps stops here, preserving every later clip's timeline position
Phase 2 - cursor sweep
- For each track, snapshots all remaining clip positions and sorts left-to-right
- Walks a cursor from time 0 and moves clips left whenever it finds a gap larger than
0.4 / fps - Because audio and video clips were removed at identical positions, the same math per-track produces identical offsets, so A/V sync is preserved
- Uses the same synchronized razor and batch-removal pass as Ripple Delete
- Does not run the gap-closing cursor sweep
- Preserves deliberate timing and gives you empty timeline regions to fill or review
- Same QE DOM razor pass to split at silence boundaries
- Collects clip refs where the midpoint falls inside a silence range
- Sets
clip.disabled = truein a batch, fully reversible
- Skips the razor entirely
- Creates sequence span markers named "Silence" for every detected region
- Use Clear Markers in the footer when you're done reviewing
Measured on a 3-minute talking-head clip, 5 tracks, ~80 silence regions:
| Step | Time |
|---|---|
| Audio analysis | ~2 s |
| Razor (QE DOM) | ~10 s |
| Batch remove + gap sweep | ~8 s |
| Disable mode | ~8 s |
| Markers only | ~3 s |
| Feature | DeadAir | AutoCut | TimeBolt | Manual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $15/mo | $200/yr | Free |
| Open source | Yes | No | No | N/A |
| Auto threshold | Yes | No | No | N/A |
| Adjustable threshold | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| Padding control | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| Ripple delete | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Non-destructive mode | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Markers mode | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| A/V sync | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| FFmpeg required | Optional | No | No | No |
| Premiere version | 2019+ | 2020+ | Standalone | Any |
- Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 or later (v13.0+)
- Windows 10+ or macOS 10.14+
- FFmpeg - optional, only needed for video clip files (MOV, MP4, MXF, etc.)
Windows: double-click installer/install-win.bat
macOS: run bash installer/install-mac.sh in terminal
The script copies the extension, sets the debug mode registry keys, and checks for FFmpeg.
-
Download and extract the release ZIP.
-
Copy the
com.deadair.silenceremoverfolder to:- Windows:
%APPDATA%\Adobe\CEP\extensions\ - macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CEP/extensions/
- Windows:
-
Enable unsigned extensions:
- Windows: set
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Adobe\CSXS.13>PlayerDebugMode = 1 - macOS:
defaults write com.adobe.CSXS.13 PlayerDebugMode 1 - Repeat for CSXS.12, CSXS.11, CSXS.10, and CSXS.9 when using older Premiere versions.
- Windows: set
-
(Video clips only) Install FFmpeg:
- Windows:
winget install ffmpeg - macOS:
brew install ffmpeg
- Windows:
-
Restart Premiere Pro, go to Window > Extensions > DeadAir - Silence Remover.
- Run Auto before anything else. It takes a few seconds and gets the threshold in the right ballpark.
- Use Markers Only first to see what's going to be cut before you commit to a ripple delete.
- Rough presets to start from:
- Talking head / interview: -35 dB, 0.8 s, 100 ms padding
- Podcast: -40 dB, 1.0 s, 150 ms padding
- Low-level noise cleanup: -70 dB, 0.2 s, 20 ms padding
- Vlog / fast-paced: -30 dB, 0.5 s, 50 ms padding
- Use Leave Gaps when timing must not shift.
- Save your project before running either removal action.
- If something looks wrong, open the Debug Log from the footer. Every clip load, scan, and ExtendScript call is logged there.
The extension has no build step. It is plain HTML/CSS/JS and ExtendScript JSX. Source validation and regression tests use Node.js and pnpm.
git clone https://github.com/nzalexgarciagil-ctrl/deadair-premiere.git
pnpm install
pnpm validate
# Copy to your CEP extensions folder and enable debug mode (see Installation)
# Edit client/ and host/ directly, changes show up on panel reload- Fork the repo
- Create a branch (
git checkout -b feature/my-feature) - Commit (
git commit -m 'feat: add my feature') - Push and open a PR
MIT - see LICENSE.
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Extension framework | Adobe CEP 9 (CSXS 9.0) |
| Panel UI | HTML/CSS/JavaScript (vanilla) |
| Audio analysis | Web Audio API (AudioContext.decodeAudioData) |
| Audio extraction | FFmpeg (optional, piped to stdout, no temp files) |
| Timeline operations | ExtendScript (ES3) + QE DOM |
| Cut method | qeSeq.razor(TC), auto-discovers working method at runtime |
| Gap closing | clip.move(delta) cursor sweep |
| Disable | clip.disabled = true batch |
| Markers | seq.markers.createMarker() + marker.duration |
| Settings | localStorage |