This whole video was edited by Claude. The cuts, the visuals and the text on the screen, all of it. And I never opened an editing app. No Premiere Pro, no CapCut, not even DaVinci.
I build useful things like this with AI every week.
Subscribe on YouTubeI put my raw clips in a single folder and sent one prompt. Claude gave back the finished video, plus the title, the description and even the tags. Here's how it works, and how you can set it up yourself. You don't need an editing app, and you don't write any code.
What you need to edit a YouTube video with Claude
- The Claude desktop app. Download it from claude.ai/download.
- A paid Claude plan. Video editing is a heavy job and it uses a lot of tokens. Opus 5.5 is very efficient, though. I use it for video editing, for running my businesses and for writing a lot of code, and I still don't hit the weekly limits.
- Your raw clips in one folder. Mistakes and retakes included.
Set up Claude
- Open the Claude app and go to the Code tab. If you're not a coder, don't worry about it. You won't write a single line of code.
- Start a new session and pick the folder with your clips.
- Set permissions to Auto. You can also use Bypass permissions, so Claude doesn't stop to ask you things and can work longer. That's what I use.
- Set the model to Opus 5.5 on medium effort.
Paste the prompt
Then paste the prompt and hit Enter. That's it.
The prompt is free in my community, Staffed. It's in the Content Creation course, in the lesson "Edit with one prompt".
How Claude edits the video, step by step
Step 1: Transcribe the clips
First Claude transcribes your videos with Whisper, a free and open-source model from OpenAI. If you don't have it on your computer, Claude downloads it first. It's a heavy model, so the first run takes a bit longer.
It needs the transcript to know where to cut. It finds the silences, the places where I pause for too long and the places where I repeat myself. If I said a line twice, it knows I took a retake.
Step 2: Plan and make the cuts
Say I took two or three takes of the same part. I only want the best one in the final video. Claude finds the one to keep and cuts the others out. If you keep all three, it's not editing in the first place.
It plans the whole thing: there's silence here, this word came out wrong, there are too many retakes there. Then it renders the cut.
Step 3: Build the visuals with HyperFrames
HyperFrames is a really powerful open-source library. Every visual starts as an HTML file. Claude writes the code, HyperFrames renders it as a video, and the visual goes on top of your footage.
For ideas, search "hyperframes" on X. People make amazing things with it. Just know that bigger, fancier visuals take longer to make.
Step 4: Loudness and export
If I speak softly, or my mic is far away, people listening at a normal volume won't hear me. So Claude raises the volume to YouTube's standard level. Every video comes out at the right volume.
Then it checks its own work, fixes any mistakes and exports the final video.
What is HyperFrames?
HyperFrames is a free, open-source framework from HeyGen that turns HTML into video. That's why it works so well with Claude. Claude is great at writing web pages, so it writes each visual as a small page with animations, and HyperFrames turns it into a video clip.
Because every visual is just code, Claude can change it in seconds, reuse it in your next video, and match it to your brand colours and fonts.
What you get
When it's done, there's a new folder next to your clips with:
- The final video, ready to upload.
- An upload file with title options, a description and tags.
- A transcript file with timestamps, ready to upload to YouTube.
So you go to YouTube, upload the video, paste the title, description and tags, and upload the transcript. All from one prompt. Mine took about 14 minutes.
Make it your own
In the same session, you can give Claude your brand: your colours and a few screenshots. Then ask it to turn the whole thing into a skill. Now you don't have to paste the prompt again. You have your own custom skill that you can use on any video.
Would you rather see and tweak every cut in a real editor? Claude can also edit your video in DaVinci Resolve.
Want to turn the finished video into Shorts too? I made a free skill for that: Long to Shorts.
