#497 – Two Fistfuls of Interesting Things
This week's free Issue of Cut/daily is a grab bag of interesting things I've seen, made, or discovered lately.
- A free app to help you turn over to Finishing
- What's it like Editing with Claude?
- A new era of Post in Hollywood
- And how to join the fun
- Sound Design Curiosities
- Adding Audio Polish Launch Offer
- Burt Reynolds reads my ebook
- And how to sign up for the next one...
But first...
please read it now. The future of Cut/daily depends on it!
And then...
This 5 minute short film/ad has fantastic storytelling energy to it that I really enjoyed. (Even if the VFX was a little ‘uncanny valley’.)
A Free Gift for You
I've made a free (or pay-what-you-want) desktop app that turns a Premiere Pro XML file into a detailed shot list you can turn over to your Post House to provide a list of every:
- transform
- crop
- rotation
- speed change
- and effect
used in the offline version.
It also outputs DaVinci Resolve Marker Lists so you/they can skip down the timeline and cross-check what should be applied to each shot.
Each shot has a #number you can cross-reference to the Master Shot List, which is particularly useful if there are a lot of keyframes involved.
XML Parser works on the Mac desktop with no need for an internet connection or data sharing of any kind.
Take it for a spin and let me know your ideas for how I can make it better!
Premiere to Resolve – Project Translation
If moving a project from Premiere to Resolve is part of your day-to-day workflow, then you should check out these two tools, which do away with XML altogether:
Video Editing with Claude?
So if you put 'Video Editing with Claude' into your YouTube search, you'll get a ton of hype-bros telling you AI is destroying video editing.
99% of the time, they are not doing anything close to video editing.
What they are actually doing is using Claude Design or the open-source Hyperframes to create motion graphics elements using code.
This video from Greg Edits Video presents a level-headed assessment of this state of affairs and most helpfully shares how to use Claude Code's LUA scripting abilities in DaVinci Resolve to create editable graphics.*
*There's a heavy sell of his preset packs, which you might begrudge, and if you were so inclined, you could use Claude to build your own versions of these very easily.
But having vibe-coded my fair share of things, there's actually a ton of hidden work in building, testing, fixing, endless problem-solving and getting unstuck that can add up to hours/days/weeks of your (expensive) time.
So it may not be worth it to roll your own if doing so takes you more than 20 minutes.
Duncan Rogoff is, however, using Claude Code to build his own content editing system, which is inventive, automated, and entirely too trusting of Claude to make good decisions.
If your goal is to shovel out ‘content’, then this will do it, but how low can the quality bar go?
If you don't watch the footage to choose the best performance, how do you know you've ended up with the best of what you had?
Garbage IN, Garbage OUT.
Sadly, maybe the internet doesn't care.
But I care!
FCP & Claude
One last link worth watching is the final demo from Ripple Training's latest course on Apple's new Creator Studio.
In it Mark Spencer demonstrates using Claude Code to – v e r y s l o w ly – edit.
As in, to actually make changes on the timeline through dictating instructions to Claude and it taking action. Obviously, the response speed will improve and I'm curious to know how he's set this up!
But to me typing/dictating isn't a satisfying editing experience in the same way that playing Guitar Hero, isn't a satisfying emulation of actually playing guitar.
While we're on the subject of Claude, Anthropic recently announced new ‘Connectors’ to popular creative apps. One of those is with Adobe Creative Cloud, starting the ball rolling on agentic editing in Premiere.
Take This Further