Claude video editor

Use Claude to edit videos and add captions — or generate a video from nothing. Drop your footage in a folder, tell Claude what you want, get final.mp4 back. No timeline, no menus, no presets.

edit these into a 60-second promo with lower-third captions, no voiceover

research the Stonehenge bluestone debate and make me a narrated explainer

This whole video — 16 painted scenes, documentary camera moves, atmosphere, the storytelling voiceover, 51 timed captions — was made by talking to Claude with this plugin. No camera, no timeline, no video-generation service: still keyframes animated deterministically with the animate-stills recipe, narration by ElevenLabs v3. First 14 seconds above, silent; watch the full video with sound.

What it can do

• Cut filler words (umm, uh), false starts, and dead space between takes
• Captions — burned-in subtitles or animated lower-thirds, in your style
• Color grade every segment (cinematic, neutral, or a custom look)
• Motion graphics — title cards, callouts, kinetic text, audio-reactive bits, scene transitions (HTML + GSAP, rendered with transparency)
• Speed ramps for slow stretches
• Transcribe any video to word-level text
• Turn a website into a video (capture a URL, animate it)
• Build videos from stills — narration-first explainers from keyframes you source ANYWHERE (AI image tools, screenshots, photos, HTML the engine renders itself), animated deterministically with camera moves + atmosphere; expressive ElevenLabs v3 narration with audio tags
• Works for anything: talking heads, tutorials, montages, promos, shorts, travel, interviews, fully generated explainers

Claude never watches the video frame by frame. It reads it (transcript + on-demand timeline previews), so it cuts on word boundaries and stays cheap and fast. It proposes a cut, waits for your OK, renders, checks every cut for jumps and audio pops, then shows you the result.

What you need

No keys or accounts ship with this repo. Everything below is yours, stored locally, and gitignored.

Tools (install.sh checks all of these):

Keys and accounts:

That's the only key. Still keyframes for generated videos come from any image source you already use (AI image tools, screenshots, photos, or HTML the engine renders itself) — see the generate-footage skill.

Install

git clone https://github.com/assafkip/claude-video-editor && cd claude-video-editor
./install.sh

install.sh checks the prereqs (ffmpeg, Node 22+, headless Chrome, Python), sets up the engine, and asks once for an ElevenLabs key (used for transcription and v3 voiceover). The key is written to a local .env that git ignores — verify with git check-ignore skills/video-use/.env.

Then register it with Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add ./           # from the repo dir
/plugin install claude-video-editor

Use

cp -r templates/project ~/my-video && cd ~/my-video
# drop clips into sources/, open Claude Code, then:

edit these into a launch video

Outputs land in edit/. Your session is remembered in project.md so next time picks up where you left off.

What's inside

Three open-source layers plus a generation layer, bundled to work together:

• video-use — the cutting engine (transcribe, cut, grade, subtitle, render)
• HyperFrames — the motion-graphics engine (HTML + GSAP overlays)
• hyperframes-student-kit — motion-design examples and craft
• generate-footage — narration-first videos from still keyframes (sourced from any image tool, screenshots, or the engine's own HTML renders), animated deterministically with HyperFrames camera moves + atmosphere, ElevenLabs v3 voiceover with audio tags

Recipes & worked examples

Step-by-step production recipes and the real project files behind them ship in the repo:

• recipes/ — three worked methods: a launch video from pure HTML, a tutorial edit from a screen recording, and a website-to-promo capture.
• examples/promo/ — the complete project behind a real launch video: DESIGN, SCRIPT, STORYBOARD, the HyperFrames composition, and vendored fonts. Pattern-match it; don't start from a blank file.
• examples/captions/ — the caption-overlay composition and render commands from the tutorial recipe.

License

Use it, modify it, share it — don't sell it. The code in this repo is MIT + Commons Clause: all MIT freedoms except the right to sell the software itself. Using it to make videos — including paid client work and commercial videos for your own business — is permitted use, not a sale.

Vendored components keep their own upstream licenses (see LICENSES/): video-use, HyperFrames, and hyperframes-student-kit. Nothing here changes their terms.

Built by Assaf Kipnis

Built and released free. Issues and PRs welcome.