AI Honestly

Can I edit video with AI?

Drew takes a real question from a working video editor: can AI actually do the editing, without abandoning their existing tools and process? He walks through what failed first — asking AI to watch raw footage, pick shots, and cut a video end to end — and why the results were unusable, with cuts landing in strange places. Then he shows the version that worked, which turns editing into a text problem instead of a vision problem.

The payoff is a concrete pipeline: transcribe every clip with Whisper, let the AI find the story in the words, review the proposed script on a simple local page, then chop the footage into handled clips ready to drop into the editor's own Final Cut Pro project. It took a two-day job down to about an hour — not by finishing the edit, but by killing the tedious hunt through hours of footage.

In this episode

  • The ambitious approach — AI watches footage and cuts its own version — failed on timing, and piling on B-roll and lower thirds only made a shaky thing worse.
  • The trick was to stop asking AI to look and start asking it to read: transcripts turn footage into timestamped words, which is what these models are actually good at.
  • The pipeline outputs sorted clips with handles (extra room front and back), not a finished video — the taste and the final cuts stay with the human.
  • A one-to-two-day job dropped to about an hour, mostly because nobody had to scrub hours of footage hunting for usable moments.
  • It's cheaper than you'd expect: the heavy lifting happens in free command-line tools, so the AI is only doing text work — doable on a $20/month plan.
  • The honest split: talking-head footage (interviews, testimonials, webinars) works well because it's text; purely visual asks work but are less reliable, which matters when a client is watching.

Timestamps

  • 0:00 — The question and the two-day-to-one-hour teaser
  • 0:49 — Editing vs generating, and keeping your own process
  • 1:55 — What failed: AI watching and cutting footage
  • 2:38 — The fix: read instead of look, with Whisper transcripts
  • 3:06 — Reviewing the script, then exporting clips to Final Cut
  • 3:38 — Before and after: two days down to an hour
  • 4:30 — What actually comes out: clips, not a finished video
  • 4:49 — What it takes: tools and surprisingly low cost
  • 5:45 — Who can do it: terminal work required
  • 6:00 — What to watch for: words vs pictures, and buying time
  • 7:18 — Send in your question

Tools mentioned: Whisper, Final Cut Pro, FFmpeg, Claude Code, Codex.

Got a question you've been wondering about — can AI do this thing? Send it to [email protected].

AI Honestly is a Work and Whistle production. More at workandwhistle.co.