Video Cut Assistant

Video Cut Assistant turns a raw footage transcript into an editor-ready plan: it reads the timestamped transcript, finds the natural beats of the conversation, and emits cut instructions plus burned-in-ready subtitles. It's built for solo editors, YouTubers, and podcast-to-clip teams who shoot long-form takes and want a first-pass rough cut decision before they ever open the timeline.

When to use it

• You recorded a 40-minute talking-head take and need to strip filler, false starts, and dead air before editing.
• You have a podcast or interview transcript and want short-form clip candidates pulled by topic beat.
• You need an SRT caption file aligned to a cut you're about to make, not the raw source.
• You want a paper edit you can hand to a collaborator working in DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro.

How it works

Feed it a transcript with timecodes (WebVTT, SRT, or a plain [hh:mm:ss] speaker: text log work best — Whisper/whisperx JSON output is ideal because word-level timings survive). The skill then:

1. Segments the transcript into beats — topic shifts, Q/A boundaries, and natural pauses.
2. Marks removable spans: filler words, repeated takes, long silences.
3. Produces a trim plan as an ordered list of keep/cut ranges with source in/out timecodes.
4. Exports two artifacts: an EDL (CMX3600 .edl) you can import into Resolve or Premiere, and an SRT caption file re-timed to the cut sequence.

Because it reasons over text, accuracy depends entirely on the timecode fidelity of your transcript. It does not touch your media files — it only writes the plan and captions.

Usage

curl -fsSL --create-dirs -o ~/.claude/skills/video-cut-assistant/SKILL.md https://claudeskil.com/skills/video-cut-assistant/SKILL.md

# point it at a transcript with timecodes
"Cut my interview.vtt down to the 3 strongest topic beats,
 remove filler and pauses over 1.5s, and give me an EDL + SRT."

Output you'll get back: interview.edl (importable cut list), interview.srt (re-timed captions), and a human-readable beat summary you can sanity-check before importing.

Tips & gotchas

• Word-level timestamps matter. Sentence-only timing produces loose cut points; run whisperx (not vanilla Whisper) for tight word alignment.
• EDLs reference source timecode, so your transcript timecodes must match the clip's timeline timecode — offset a transcript that started at 00:00:00 against media that starts at 01:00:00:00 and every cut will be wrong.
• The trim plan is a paper edit, not a render. Always review beats before importing; the model can misjudge where a thought actually ends.
• For Premiere, import the .edl rather than pasting cuts manually — frame rate mismatches silently drift otherwise.

FAQ

Does it edit my video file? No. It generates the cut list and captions; you apply them in your NLE.

What if my transcript has no timecodes? It can still find beats and draft captions, but cut ranges won't be frame-accurate — supply timed input for usable EDLs.

Resolve or Premiere? Both. The CMX3600 EDL imports into either; SRT works anywhere.