Claude for video editing

What Claude can edit for you

Each of these jobs has a skill that teaches Claude how to do it:

• Cut silences and dead air from a talking-head recordingCut Silences · Nate Herk
• Remove stutters, repeated words, false starts and retakesCut Mistakes · Nate Herk
• Tighten a long recording: fillers, hedges and repetitions out, laughs keptCut Video · Louise de Sadeleer
• Edit a full talking-head video: transcribe, trim, add motion graphicsEdit Video · Nate Herk
• Rough-cut in DaVinci Resolve, from the keep-list to the timelineRough Cut · appariciojunior
• Turn raw footage into a clean master cut for YouTubeClean Cut · LearnWithHasan
• Remove background noise and isolate the voiceClean Audio · LearnWithHasan
• Turn long footage into a reel, YouTube Short or short adShort Form Edit · Nate Herk
• Trim, join, resize, speed up, compress and convert clipsVideo Edit · OpenMontage
• Transcribe, display and animate captionsRemotion Captions · Remotion
• Make motion graphics, titles and explainers from HTMLHyperframes · HeyGen
• Drop in ready-made transitions, overlays and kinetic typeHyperframes Registry · HeyGen
• Make launch films and motion design in pure codeClaude Motion Design · Howseen AI
• Animate math and technical explainers, 3Blue1Brown styleManim Skill · Yusuke710
• Build cinematic product promos from shot recipesVideo Shotcraft · Wei Yihao
• Generate a YouTube thumbnail with an AI image modelYouTube Thumbnail · LearnWithHasan
• Understand footage before editing it, with frames and a transcriptVideo Understand · OpenMontage
• Translate and dub a video into other languagesVideo Translate · OpenMontage

How to edit videos with Claude Code

1. Install Claude Code. Video work needs Claude running on your own computer, next to your footage, so use Claude Code rather than the chat app.
2. Install ffmpeg. It's the free tool that does the actual cutting and encoding. Get it from ffmpeg.org or your package manager, for example brew install ffmpeg on macOS.
3. Add a video editing skill. Pick one from the 66 Claude skills for video editing. Each page shows its install command. Full kits such as Herk Edit Kit and OpenMontage work best when you clone their repository and run Claude Code inside it.
4. Put your footage in the project folder and ask. Describe the edit in plain words. Claude transcribes, plans the cuts, runs them and tells you what it changed.
5. Review and iterate. Watch the result and ask for changes, like “keep the pause before the punchline” or “make the captions bigger”.

Prompts to try

• Cut the silences and stutters from interview.mp4 and export a 1080p MP4.
• Find the best 45 seconds in podcast.mp4 and make a vertical Short with burned-in captions.
• Add a title card and lower-thirds with my name to intro.mp4.
• Compress every clip in /raw to under 50 MB without visible quality loss.
• Make a 20-second product promo from screenshots of my landing page.

What to expect

• Great at the tedious parts: cutting dead air and retakes, resizing for each platform, compressing, captioning and batch jobs across many files.
• You still judge the taste. Claude works from the transcript and sampled frames, so watch the cut before you publish.
• Rendering runs on your machine, so long or high-resolution videos take time and disk space.
• Some skills call paid services, such as AI video generation or HeyGen translation, and need your own API key. Local ffmpeg editing is free.