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Show HN: A different kind of AI Video generation
fcpguru
4 days ago
37
10
Hello!

I'm Andrew Arrow, a developer and Final Cut Pro user. My history with FCP goes back years and years, I tried to be a video editor as a career but ended up a software developer. I purchased the full version of the software a long, long time ago. And to Apple's credit, every single time I goto the App Store on any mac I still have access to download it. I must have been through 20, 30? I don't know, but a lot of macs over the years. Just recently I downloaded it again and noticed the XML Export feature.

Wow. There's a lot of stuff there. I mean a lot. I started playing around with generating the XML and that has lead to this project.

https://github.com/andrewarrow/cutlass/blob/main/README.md

Read through those go structs and xml tags. Keep going. And going. It just never stops! It's a very sophisticated XML format that can describe any timeline, effect, or animation you can imagine. Apple's documentation is scattered, the XML is notoriously finicky, and one wrong attribute crashes your import.

And of course with Claude Code (or others, pick your favorite AI) you can have your AI write some amazing things in go using cutlass.

```go // Generate a timeline with precise keyframe animations

video := fcp.Video{

    Ref: assetID,

    Offset: "0s", 

    Duration: fcp.ConvertSecondsToFCPDuration(10.0),

    AdjustTransform: &fcp.AdjustTransform{

        Params: []fcp.Param{{

            Name: "position",

            KeyframeAnimation: &fcp.KeyframeAnimation{

                Keyframes: []fcp.Keyframe{

                    {Time: "0s", Value: "0 0"},

                    {Time: "240240/24000s", Value: "100 50"},

                },

            },

        }},

    },
} ```

So I haven't been writing code like that with my human brain. I spend most of my time just telling Claude the video I want to create, and he uses the cutlass library to achieve it. I'm hooking up FCP directly to Claude. A different kind of AI Video generation.

Would love feedback, thanks for reading this far! -aa

iLoveOncall6 hours ago
It's video editing, not video generation at all, not even a "different kind". Really cool though.
santana16iLoveOncall6 hours ago
Yeah, but further developed it could pass for editing
iinnPPiLoveOncall5 hours ago
Creating a video through edits is generation of a video.

This is a great project that demonstrates a unique way to tackle a problem from someone with a passion for those problems.

echelon5 hours ago
Editing will remain of utmost strategic important to automate until generation dominates the field. At that point, we'll probably generate from storyboards.

A lot of small startups are trying to automate timeline construction with VLMs. I've counted about a dozen, some with seed stage funding. If you can crack this, there's absolutely a path to a unicorn. But in the long term, generation will disrupt nonlinear video editors, because whatever high level software we build will be able to dispatch to both generation and editing tasks.

Fwiw, I also work in this space and spend a lot of time thinking about it. Prior to AI, I also spent a significant amount of time making films the old fashioned way.

ozgungechelon4 hours ago
Could you name a few of these startups please?
absolute_unit22ozgung4 hours ago
I’m curious as well.

I’ve been exploring this space for a potential project - curious to see what these startups are doing

jasonjmcgheeozgung2 hours ago
I feel like they've really changed how they are presenting themselves but Runway was the big one that came to mind for me that focus on more than simple video generation but actually meant for film makers.

This is the best page I found- maybe there's a better one...

https://runwayml.com/product

But its interface looks like a video editor- timeline, etc

Y_Y5 hours ago
It is a law of "AI" that every project must have a name collision with Nvidia:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/cutlass

barefootford2 hours ago
Hey I’ve been trying to get Claude code to generate Final Cut xml myself. Mostly I just have a Claude.md with the FCP xml reference and some guidelines. What does this do differently?
EGreg3 minutes ago
Wow, this is fantastic. I have been searching for a tool that would let me output videos like that.

I was going to create a javascript-based version of FCP to essentially implement the keyframes and transitions with arbitrary videos from youtube/vimeo and try to queue them up before they play. Then people would come to our site or use our widget to play all the videos.

I even considered doing a kenburns effect and zooming/panning/cropping the videos. I wanted to have the AI do some takes, finding highlights in the video by transcribing it.

And adding the stupid text overlays etc. would be done in javascript so we don’t need to generate so many versions of the video for different languages or styles.

What do you think? Should we use cutlass xml as the format? Probably better to just make our own json no?

Does anything like this already exist? There are a bunch of sites to edit video timelines. Maybe there is a js lib, like prezi for presentations etc?