Edit video with Claude Code

Claude Code can edit video if you give it a way to see the footage and change the cut. There are four common setups. They trade control against effort, so start from what you want at the end.

Setup	You get	Good for
A skill, such as video-use	A rendered file	Talking heads and tutorials from a chat or a server
An MCP editor, such as Palmier Pro or Kino	A timeline your agent reaches from outside	Keeping your agent in its own terminal
An editor with the agent inside, such as Uncut	A timeline and the agent in one window	Watching the cut and fixing it by hand
Code, with Remotion	A video written as React	Motion graphics with no camera footage

Edit with Claude Code in Uncut

1. Install what it needs. Download Uncut for an Apple silicon Mac, install Claude Code and sign in, then run brew install ffmpeg. For transcripts, add brew install whisper-cpp. Uncut checks all of this on first launch.
2. Start a project and add footage. Drop your clips into the media panel. They stay where they are on your Mac.
3. Say what you want. Describe the film as you would to an editor: "Cut these takes into a 45 second launch film, keep the best delivery, add captions". Type / to pick a skill such as /talking-head or /launch-promo.
4. Watch it plan and build. The agent writes a brief and a storyboard, then edits the timeline while you watch. It can read transcripts, look at frames and rank takes.
5. Let the critic look. A separate process with none of the conversation scores rendered frames. Blockers send the edit back, for up to three rounds in a turn.
6. Take over. Undo the whole turn, ask for a change with @ pointing at a clip, or trim by hand on the same timeline.
7. Export. H.264 or HEVC, the whole edit or a range, with optional subtitles.

What it costs and what leaves your Mac

Uncut is free and has no account. The agent's work counts against your Claude plan or API usage, and a review round uses more of it. Your footage files stay on your Mac, while your prompts, transcripts and frames go to Anthropic, or to the cloud provider you use with Claude Code. If you use generators, your prompts go to those services with your own keys.

Where this falls short

• The agent sees sampled frames. It can miss what happens between them, so watch the result yourself.
• A passed review means a separate model found no blockers. Taste is still yours.
• Long projects fill the agent's context. Uncut shows a meter, and it helps to work in short turns.
• Uncut is Mac only, and it exports H.264 and HEVC, with no ProRes or project interchange yet.

Codex works in Uncut as well. The critic still runs through Claude Code, so keep that installed if you want reviews.

Sources

• Claude Code docs
• video-use
• Remotion
• Uncut README