Rated M for Mature

I have been making some YouTube videos, mostly game walkthroughs, with my brother and friends. I want to try and avoid profanities though, because games such as Minecraft often have quite a young audience. Is there an easy way to bleep out the swear words on our videos when we’re recording? Adam Dmitriyev

Unless you’re clairvoyant, there’s no way to bleep swearing in real time. Live TV programs are transmited with a five-to-10-second delay built in. Some poor soul has to sit and listen to the live stream and press a button if they hear any swearing. The beep is inserted into the delayed audio stream at a point corresponding to one or two seconds before the button was pushed. This compensates for the reaction time delay.

This set-up isn’t practical for the casual YouTuber, though, so you have to do it with offline editing. If you’re using iMovie, this is pretty simple to do. Scrub the play head forward to the beginning of the swear word and hit ç+B to split the clip. Do the same at the end of the swearing. Now right-click the middle segment with the swearing and choose Detach Audio. Rightclick the green audio segment that appears below and choose Cut to delete it. You can use the Comedy Low Honk sound from iMovie’s built-in sound effect library or download any other mp3 sample from a royalty-free source on the web. Drag this across to the audio track on your video and trim the ends to match the length of the swearing clip.