louisedesadeleer/cut-video

Cut Video is a skill that plugs into Claude Code, the coding assistant from Anthropic. Once installed, it adds a /cut-video slash command that takes a long recording and produces a tighter version with silences, ums, fillers, and dead air removed. The author tuned it to keep laughs and comedic pauses, so the cuts do not flatten joke timing or emotional beats. The skill works in four steps. First, it transcodes the source file into a 1080p H.264 proxy using hardware decoding, so each later step runs in seconds instead of minutes. Then it runs OpenAI's Whisper model (the tiny English variant) to transcribe the audio with word-level timestamps. Next it builds a cut plan using a tone-aware silence heuristic, drops fillers and false starts, and shows you that plan before changing anything. Finally it renders the result with ffmpeg using a trim and concat approach, which the README says keeps audio in sync where the more common select filter tends to drift. The README explains why the project exists. Most silence-cutters either cut too aggressively (removing laughs) or are slow on large 4K HEVC files. The author tested against a 7-minute 4K interview that took over 5 minutes just to decode in other tools, and brought the same cut down to about 30 seconds by combining VideoToolbox hardware acceleration with hardware-friendly trim and concat steps. Three tone presets are offered: playful (the default, aggressive on dead air but keeps comedic beats), sentimental (gentler, preserves longer pauses for emotional moments), and documentary (only cuts genuine dead air over 8 seconds). The skill runs entirely on your machine with no cloud calls, and is built for Apple Silicon on macOS. Linux or Windows users would need to remove the VideoToolbox flags. The README is clear that this is a cutting tool only. It does not add zooms, captions, b-roll, or motion graphics. It needs Claude Code, ffmpeg with libx264, and Whisper installed first.