• explain what Claude Code can and cannot do with video, and what it costs in tokens, time and privacy
• protect your originals and set up a project folder, a CLAUDE.md and permission rules for video work
• cut silences and bad takes, add captions, make vertical clips and loud-normalise audio with ffmpeg
• build animated titles, lower thirds, charts and word-highlight captions with Remotion
• check every edit with ffprobe numbers and stills, and know when to hand the work to a real editor
• run the whole pipeline end to end on a practice project

• A short summary of what the lesson teaches and why it matters
• Step-by-step instructions you can follow along
• Commands, configuration or code you can copy
• Watch out notes on the mistakes that catch most people
• A Try it exercise to check that it worked

• Developers who want to cut, caption and polish screen recordings and talking-head videos with a repeatable, scriptable process
• Creators and tutorial makers who want rough cuts, captions and vertical clips from a transcript instead of by hand
• Anyone who has tried asking an AI to edit video and wants to know what works, what fails and how to check the result

• Claude Code installed and signed in, and basic comfort with a terminal
• ffmpeg and ffprobe (Lesson 2.1 shows how to check your build)
• Node.js for the scripts in this guide and for Remotion
• Optional: whisper.cpp or openai-whisper for transcripts, and a short recording of your own

Work through the chapters in order and do the Try it exercise at the end of each lesson. Set up ffmpeg, a Whisper tool and, if you want animated graphics, a Remotion project in chapter 2, then copy the prompts and scripts into your own project, changing file names and thresholds. Always work on copies, test on a short clip first, and keep the cheat sheet open for the commands you use most.

Cut the silences out using a silencedetect log

Detect silences into a log, run a short Node script that turns the log into a filter_complex file (one trim and one atrim per speech segment, then concat), apply it with -/filter_complex, and check the new duration and re-detect silence. The same script shape works for an edit decision list.