Claude Code 剪辑实战：告别时间线与剪辑软件，用终端打造短视频帝国

Claire Val: No timeline, no project file, no editor. You figured out a way to use Claude code to encode editing that really fits the form, which is short-form content. The file's in the computer, it doesn't upload anywhere. The only thing that's happening is the instructions [music] are being pulled and it's doing all of the things. It's just running the computer.

Brooke Lacey: And [music] not only that, but it's listening and goes, "Oh, I just heard you say cut that out." And then it also was like, "You repeated this a couple of times and I took the one that was the best cadence." And I was like, "What?"

Claire Val: And what just happened is Claude descended upon our videos and cut them. [music] It just pulled up the raw video. There was a really well-clipped vertical short-form video, perfect to TikTok cadence. And you did it with no hands.

Brooke Lacey: So, literally, I do everything in the terminal. I like it better. It just has way more access to everything. So, let's say, "Okay, my dude, I'm ready to show the audience the magic." And look, no hands. This is probably the 15th or 16th time in the last 6 months that I literally like fell to the floor.

Claire Val: What just happened?

Claire Val: Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Val, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Brooke Lacey and she is going to walk us through her Claude code for video editing flow. She has over 200,000 followers on TikTok and she's figured out how to get Claude to edit her videos to be funny and have the right jump cuts, create scripts for new content, and generally understand her cadence, her vibe, and her style. Let's get to it.

Claire Val: This episode is brought to you by Firecrawl, which gives your AI agents data [music] from the web and beyond. Your agents can search and scrape the web while accessing Alexander's rapidly expanding [music] library of over 100 million indexed sources and more than 200 data providers all through one connection. Connect Firecrawl to ChatGPT or Claude to find people and their work emails, pick your fantasy football lineup, or analyze trends for your next marketing campaign. Firecrawl is building the library for superintelligence, bringing more of the world's knowledge into the tools you already use. Go to firecrawl.dev/howia to get started. Brooke, thanks for joining How I AI.

Brooke Lacey: I'm so excited. I think that you know, but I would like your audience to know that I'm like the biggest fangirl. I really love what you do, and I'm just so excited to be here.

Claire Val: Well, I love what what you do, and so we're going to talk about why I got you on this podcast, which is you have a Claude code video editing social empire building stack that I I need to steal cuz before we got on, we were talking about how a little while ago I was like on my way to being a big deal on TikTok, and then I a girl gets tired and like long form video you can talk forever, short form video you got to spend so many hours cutting out the ums and the ahs and the jump cuts and the auto captions and the and the music. And so when you tweeted, "I'm literally editing using Claude code," I lost it and I was like, "No way, no way, no way."

Brooke Lacey: Let me just start this. Like video short form video and like like little live stream stuff it has not I've been doing that for a long time. Like before Facebook even had, you know, video stuff, I was on the news. Like video content is not new for me. The short form was kind of a big deal when I got on Tik Tok like 2020 and the trick there is those jump cuts. They're very difficult. I do a lot of funny stuff. I was known for ogling shirtless lumberjacks and like doing some funny stuff and then also did tech stuff.

And so I'm not a video editor. I never learned Final Cut Pro or Premiere, none of that. I didn't even know CapCut for a long time cuz I don't like doing it on my phone. And shortcuts and all that, I can never remember. So I learned Descript, which is great, but it's expensive, takes forever to download and wait on, you know, their rendering.

And so I was like, "How do we do this?" And you have people kind of trying to do this. And so the more and more I worked in the terminal, the more I was like, "Wait, they're they're doing that with terminal tools and with the LLM. Why can't I just say, 'Hey, dude, cut this video?'" And then so I did, and he was like, "Yeah, give it to me." And opens the video and I'm like, "What?" And then, not only that, but it's listening and goes, "Oh, I just heard you say cut that out." And then it also was like, "You repeated this a couple of times and I took the one that was the best cadence." And I was like, "What?" "What did you do?" And I mean, sat back, this is probably the 15th or 16th time in the last 6 months that I literally like fell to the floor. Like, I'm so dramatic anyway, but I was like, "What just happened?" Like, [laughter] what?

Claire Val: And what just happened is Claude descended upon our videos and cut them. So, let's let's show it because I have been doing this a little bit, but I think you have a much better system than me. So, I'm just going to sit here and and learn it. So, show us.

Brooke Lacey: again, it's only going to be fun because of the way I'm talking about it cuz it's really, really freaking boring. Like, it's just boring. But of course, you and I think it's amazing and hopefully your audience will too.

Claire Val: Yes. Let's show it. This is the how AI vibe. We will make your markdown and Python look like the sexiest things on planet Earth, so show it.

Brooke Lacey: I love you. Okay. Here Here we go. So, how does it work? Okay. So, literally I do everything in the terminal. I have for a long time. I I like it better. It just has way more access to everything in my opinion. So, let's say, "Okay, my dude, I'm ready to show the audience the magic." Go again.

Claire Val: And did you prepopulate this with a skill or with a prompt? Oh.

Brooke Lacey: And look, no hands. Okay, so this one is the this one is like the non-edited. I'm so [laughter] dumb. Sorry. Okay, you can like

Claire Val: it's like to be a creator.

Brooke Lacey: I'm so sorry.

Video Audio: Everyone at work talks about AI as if you're already supposed to know how to use it. And you just nod along, smile and nod along.

Video Audio: Everyone at work talks about AI as if you're already supposed to know

Video Audio: It's an app I built called Jayla. The first three are free. It's jayla.app. I'll see you in there.

Claire Val: Wait. Quick pause. Okay, so for people that are listening, not watching, she said, "Okay, my dude, let's go." I'm presuming that called some sort of skill on on the back and maybe you can walk us through exactly how the prompt works. It just pulled up the raw video and then approximately 4 seconds later there was a really well-clipped vertical short-form video, perfect to TikTok cadence. And you did it with no hands.

Brooke Lacey: Yeah, he I said, "Walk us through what you're doing, you're live online, my guy." And it said one phone take, which is what I was telling you before, was actually the one that um that I showed you, let's just see, this one right here, if you see my mouse, that was the, you know, the rough cut. Yeah. Then place the cuts, so eight of them picked from its own TSV file. Each row is a start and end, a shot size, which I could show you that file, but it's literally just cut, you know, it's just a folder or it's it's just a Yeah. Um it's got every row has a start and end, a shot size, a label.

Brooke Lacey: And that just means that like you can type it out and it'll edit. It Claude kept telling me that and I was like, "Okay, so the file is the whole edit." So, drop in the app screens. I literally just said, "Go find the By the way, my app is not called Jayla anymore, it's called Zosha. I had to rename it because of anyway. Um, but so go find the screen recordings, crop them, drop them in, clean the audio, add the captions, add the music, render and play. And that's what it did.

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Claire Val: Okay, just I'm like, "Dear Claude, make a funny video." And it doesn't work because of exactly what you're talking about.

Brooke Lacey: Correct.

Claire Val: I I also just have to empathize as a TikTok girly. Do you know how often I'm sitting in CapCut being like, "Cut it right like right here like

Brooke Lacey: Correct.

Claire Val: cuz I know what funny sounds like. But just a couple things that I want people to know is you've actually really structured what a good short-form edit looks like. Jump cuts between times, clip to words. I love this idea of three frames. I was like, "Just zoom in when it's funny." But I like this idea of like frame wide and close cut because if you all don't know, keeping things moving keeps people's eyes engaged. And then uh the auto captions and what people don't understand is that can all run with existing tools and files on your computer really well. But I I have to imagine this took some zhuzhing to get right.

Brooke Lacey: And I do I to tell your audience watching listening I know I said it before but video content is not new to me. So, I'm not a video editor. It was just by way of I had to do it because I was starting a business a long time ago. I didn't have money to hire a video production company, so I got the camera, I figured out how to do it.

And so I already had that visual, you know, what what catches people's eyes? Don't zoom in all the way to your nose, give it some margin, you know, do these different things. Give it some breathing room, look at the rule of thirds, keep the pacing tight. And above all, if you pause for half a second, they're gone! In short form, half a second of silence and the viewer swipes away.

So, when I wrote the instructions, I didn't just say "cut my video." I baked in all those rules: cut tightly to words, switch shot sizes between wide and tight on specific cadence shifts, and if there are duplicate takes, compare the cadence and pick the punchiest one.

Video Audio: for 25 years and I've never been this scared for people. An AI founder just told 40 million people on Twitter

Brooke Lacey: Okay. So, what I'm saying in the video is that Andre Karpathy quote that it was like, you know, he doesn't um code anymore. He just like doesn't even know how to keep up. Um that was actually one of the biggest videos that I've had.

Claire Val: Okay, yeah. So, just to walk people through if they're not watching. I think what what is happening here is you went on your phone and you downloaded all your Tik Tok videos and you put them in Google Drive or a local folder, is that right?

Brooke Lacey: Correct. Cuz

Claire Val: one has all these comments, right?

Brooke Lacey: Yep.

Brooke Lacey: And yep, and it says like, I wonder if hospitals are going to start using AI for the billing and coding. Okay, cool. Um well, on the phone, you can reply with a video. And then, you know, see, it like Is that I'm trying to get people's attention that way. Figure that out. And it it did. He did.

Claire Val: So, just to kind of like repeat for people, in addition to downloading these videos, and so they can be referenced and and um combined with comments to come out videos. You actually taught Claude to understand storytelling. How do I hook people? How do I create a peak in a story? All that kind of stuff. And then it's using all that knowledge not only to make your cuts better, but also give you scripts.

Brooke Lacey: Correct, which I just brought up on the screen. And this was I you know, not to get into the whole whole story, but there's a a style of video that I do WTF even is. And I was doing it for um some companies.

Claire Val: I mean, please please like and subscribe to my create your digital avatar with Gemini episode where I created very hilarious uh tradwife AI versions of myself and do videos. Uh so, never say never, but this is so cool.

Brooke Lacey: Okay, so don't be mad, but I don't really have to post that often to still have a really good engaged audience. Um I did the work. I put in the work for quite a few years, and a lot of my content still performs.

Claire Val: You don't even know.

Brooke Lacey: know how I don't [laughter] cuz I just do this. Claude's business.

Claire Val: Um, Brooke, I love this as a as a creator um who does long form that like needs to get back in short form but it just doesn't have the hours to do editing. I'm going to go steal all of this. I would like to make a plea for more experienced technologists to share their knowledge on these new platforms, pretty please. We need that combination of like wizened experience and yolo energy, especially right now.

Brooke Lacey: I'm happily in my 50s. All right, just 50. [laughter] Just turned 50. Yeah. Oh, I love this and I wish we had hours and hours and maybe you'll have me back. Everyone's worried about AI. Well, back then we were worried about toasters! And so you know I had the same experience as you which is I have seen technology shift after technology shift. So this one happened I was like I see it. I'm in. I'm in. It is going to change my life like these previous ones have. And so, um jump on in. Water's warm.

Claire Val: Okay, last question. You're you're so lovely. And I like that Claude is a boy for you. That's very nice. When he is a disappointment, when he's not doing what you want, how do you prompt him?

Brooke Lacey: Okay, so also [clears throat] a very long story, but I will keep it concise. The Grok Bot person wrote an article the other day about their P stack. I can't remember the name. It was like banana something. Her [laughter] was it was Petunia or something. Um and I ran it against my OS. So, what I built a while ago with my dear Claude is this lane operating system that is really built into my dotfiles and aliases.

And so when he's messing up, I don't sit there and be polite like "could you please fix this?" I literally go into the terminal and go, "Dude, pay attention! What are you doing? Look at what you just output. Go back and re-read the stage one spec and run it again." And he immediately snaps back into line and gets it right.

Claire Val: I love it. I love it. Brooke, this has been I don't know if the audience can tell we're having a good time. We're having a good time today. This has been a good one. Um where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

Brooke Lacey: I am at Brooke J. Lacey on every platform. I've been around a long time. Um Tik Tok is definitely my biggest audience. There's a lot of funny stuff that hopefully makes you laugh. I am a lot more on Twitter and I have a really cool app called Zosha that I built and it's just learning AI and you're kind of doing it on your phone and it's free.

Claire Val: Amazing. Well, thank you for joining How I AI.

Brooke Lacey: Thank you for having me.

Claire Val: Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.