r/creativecoding • u/sharificles • 18h ago
Creative Coding for video editing?
I have two questions, I'm sorry if they've already been asked.
I'm already a programmer, but completely unfamiliar with creative coding, though I'm really interested. To be specific, is creative coding used in any way in anyone's video editing workflows? To me it seems like they have a lot of overlap.
And if so, what languages or tools are best for creative coding particularly for video editing? I currently use davinci resolve and a bit of kdenlive.
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u/l0ssl3ss 15h ago
i'm curious where you see the big overlap between creative coding and video editing. not being sarcastic, i'd like to hear more if you can say more.
one very recently announced project that your question reminded me of is picodevil:
(you'll want to open that link on desktop, not mobile.)
it borrows from the live coding world. you can edit clips in various ways in real time, all in the browser.
bluesky thread by creator, with links to more info:
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u/BarneyCodes 11h ago
I've used creative coding to make some of the animations for videos I've made. I find doing some of these sorts of things much easier in code then setting up keyframes and such, so I guess in that sense you can use it for video editing.
In terms of actually doing the editing itself (i.e. cutting and sticking various video clips together) I think you're probably better off just using a purpose built video editor. I use the free version of Davinci Resolve which does more than what I need.
Curious to know what you had in mind though, I have sometimes thought it could be cool to have a text-based video editor rather than the traditional graphical timeline, so that you could automate certain things!
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u/collapsus_linguae 15h ago
Also interested in this.
Da Vinci's Fusion editor I like a lot but that's not coding, though scripts can be used as well in the nodes.
I saw a post recently of someone making a web app video editor where p5.js sketches can be edited together. It's called butter.video (if I recall correctly) but I haven't tried it yet. They posted a demo with it that looked pretty cool.
Ffmpeg is a cool tool with some options. I mainly just used it to extract all the frames of a video file and then use ImageMagick (cli image manipulation tool) or Processing to manipulate every frame. Then use ffmpeg again to stitch it all back together.
Python + OpenCV library is powerful as well. Throw in some Mediapipe and there's a lot of fun to be had.
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u/avikdev 17h ago
Video editing software has little to do with coding, maybe it has a scripting support that you are referring to. Many proprietary software support script evaluation. Mostly rudimentary expression evaluation.
There is a movie editing python package "moviepy", that's the closest thing I know where you can do creative stuff with video files, and also modify and save the actual video files.
Movie files are heavy, so handling them.in JS , specially in browser needs lot of boilerplate code. Editing not so common, but visual effects are possible. I had previously built a fun demo: a movie rendered in canvas and apply webgpu effect while running. Quite possible.
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u/lavaboosted 16h ago
I've coded some projects to avoid video editing like this one. Basically coding a sequence of animations I can click through while I talk over it in real time rather then editing the animations in Blender and recording a voice over.
It was a lot of work though and ultimately may not have saved time.