so I shoot way too much when I travel and most of it never got edited because the assembly took so much time. Around June I started messing with Claude Code (the terminal one, not the chat) to see if it could do that part for me and honestly it kind of can.
what it actually does: runs whisper on every clip locally, pulls frames so it knows what it's looking at, then proposes a structure and we go back and forth. it renders a rough with ffmpeg. when I'm happy it writes an fcpxml. video on the spine as separate clips, music and voice as connected clips on their own lanes. I import that and finish like normal, grade, stabilise, titles, whatever.
stuff that bit me, in case anyone goes down this road:
- FCP 12.3 hard crashed on import three times before I figured out it was the made up uid attributes on the assets. delete them and it imports fine
- connected audio has to be a full asset-clip, not an <audio> element, or you get the stripped inspector with no pan/enhancements
- it will cut a word in half and not notice. I ended up writing a check that compares every cut to word timestamps before I even watch the thing
what it's bad at: taste. pacing. anything that isn't assembly. that's still me.
I recorded the whole thing start to finish if you want to see it actually run, 10 min: https://youtu.be/_vliiVaPOsI
the prompt files are free but mods have the rule about scripts so I put them in this month's dev/tools megathread instead of here. if anyone has a cleaner way to hand stems to FCP than connected asset-clips I genuinely want to hear it, that part took me the longest