Furnace: rough cuts before captions

Furnace works on source media before captions exist: the clips in the Ember/Furnace bin in a Resolve project, or the media imported into an Ember project. It assembles a rough cut and hands that cut to the rest of the workflow. Captions then follow the rough cut's clock, so you are not captioning material you were going to remove.

Furnace is part of the trial and of Pro and Max. On Lite the Furnace toggle is disabled. Trim Pauses comes with the trial; Take Cleanup and Cast need Pro or Max. The jobs can be combined.

1. Put the source in place

   In a Resolve project, place the clips you want Furnace to work on in the Ember/Furnace bin of the Media Pool, in the order you want them played. In an Ember project, the project's own imported clips are the source. Order matters when several files are packed into one output.

2. Make sure the source is reachable

   Furnace needs its source media: that bin in a Resolve project, or the project's own clips in an Ember project. The bin appears after Ember's Resolve script has run in the project. If Ember cannot find the bin or the clips, it says so instead of guessing at a folder on disk.

3. Choose what the pass should do

   Trim Pauses, Take Cleanup and Cast are independent switches. Turn on only the work you want to review.

A partial In/Out range is respected. Ember reads the range you selected rather than the whole recording, which keeps long sources practical.

Trim Pauses removes long quiet gaps from the rough cut. Short breaths stay so the result still sounds like speech; long dead air goes.

Threshold

The level, in dBFS, below which a passage counts as silence.

Minimum Gap

How long a silence must last before it becomes a cut. Raise it to keep more natural pauses.

Before / After

How much room to keep on each side of speech, so a cut never clips the first or last syllable.

Open Adjust on a file to preview its cuts on the waveform before anything is assembled. The popup starts on the first file in the bin and keeps a File list for the rest. Threshold, Minimum Gap, Before and After redraw the cuts as you move them, with playback on the same waveform so you hear the result on the material. Values you set on one file carry to the next, and the last values you set become the default for files you never opened.

Take Cleanup removes the parts of a recording that were never meant to be used: crew talk, laughter and off-mic chatter between takes, filler before a restart, false starts and scrapped attempts. When several attempts cover the same lines, it prefers the clean, completed take.

Take Cleanup needs Pro or Max, and it is not used with Scripts. Scripts already defines what must survive, so let the script be the authority there.

Review the result before you rely on it. Take Cleanup is an editorial decision, not a silence measurement, and a deliberately raw moment may be worth keeping.

Cast chooses short-form clips from a longer source. Cast needs Pro or Max. Turn it on when you want Ember to find the strongest spoken moments instead of keeping everything.

Clips

With Type Multiple, how many short-form outputs Cast should build.

Duration

Estimate aims each clip at a target length. Auto lets Cast decide what the material supports.

Instructions

A short brief in your own words: the topic to favor, the part to skip, the angle to look for.

Hook

With Cast on, writes a short opening line for each clip and holds it at the top of the frame for the duration you choose. Hook lines take the Hook Style.

Cast can drop parts of a script, because choosing clips is choosing what to leave out. If every spoken line has to survive, turn Cast off and use Trim Pauses and Take Cleanup only.

Scripts keeps the words your client approved. Scripts needs Pro or Max. Press + in the Audio card to add Script 1, Script 2 and so on, and paste one script into each card. Every card must be filled or removed before Start. The card order does not have to match the source order: the clip slot decides the pairing. In Scripts, Type, Cast and Take Cleanup are not offered because the script decides what survives.

• A partial match is reported with its coverage, and the run continues with it.
• A slot that matches too little of the script, or has no match at all, is skipped with a warning rather than filled with invented text.

Type decides how the rough cut is laid out.

When the rough cut is ready, it becomes the timeline the rest of the pass uses. Captions, Shuffle and Ignite all read that same cut.

The rough cut is the timeline captions and polish are built on, so the next step depends on where you are going.

• Captions

  Fix wording and timing in the subtitle editor once the rough cut is captioned.

• Ignite

  Place the caption Style and the polish on the rough cut.

• Export

  Render and deliver the clips Cast built.

• A Multicam or compound clip has no single file Ember can read, so Resolve mixes its audio for the pass.
• A pass that cannot verify its cleanup keeps the rough cut on its original timeline instead of claiming a clean result.
• Furnace is about assembling a cut, not about styling it. The look and polish happen later, in Ignite.
• With Cast on, the number of clips and their length are targets, not guarantees. The available speech decides what can actually be built.