All skillsEditing

Cut Video

Tighten long recordings — cut silences, ums, and dead air, while keeping the laughs.

About

A Claude Code skill that tightens long-form recordings — it removes silences, ums, fillers, and dead air while preserving laughs and comedic pauses.

More accurate than cutting from Whisper alone: cuts are driven by Montreal Forced Aligner word boundaries (~10–20ms precision) rather than raw Whisper timestamps (±100–300ms). Whisper produces the transcript text; MFA snaps it to the audio. The result: tighter cuts, no clipped word onsets, and reliable silence detection.

Runs entirely on your machine — no cloud APIs. Tuned against a 7-minute 4K HEVC interview that took 5+ minutes just to decode in other tools; with the right ffmpeg flags the same source cuts in ~30 seconds.

What it does

  • Makes a 1080p H.264 proxy with hardware decode so every step runs in seconds
  • Transcribes with Whisper, then force-aligns with MFA for the draft cut list
  • Tone-aware silence heuristic: aggressive / balanced / sentimental / documentary
  • Ground-truths every keep boundary with isolated-window re-transcription
  • Renders with trim + concat (not select) so audio never drifts, then verifies the output
  • Optional browser timeline editor — canvas waveform, drag-to-delete, live preview

Install

terminal
$ git clone https://github.com/louisedesadeleer/cut-video.git ~/.claude/skills/cut-video

Restart Claude Code and /cut-video is available as a slash command.

How to use it

  1. Run /cut-video and paste a video file path when asked.
  2. Pick a tone preset (aggressive is the default), review the proposed cut list, then say go.
  3. It renders the cleaned version, verifies the transcript is clean, and opens it for review.

Record better videos, faster