AI-generated summary of I Tried Fully Automating My Video Editing With AI (RAW RESULTS), Ali Abdaal. Not written or verified by the author.

Takeaways: I Tried Fully Automating My Video Editing With AI (RAW RESULTS)

2026-11-04 · Source: I Tried Fully Automating My Video Editing With AI (RAW RESULTS).srt (auto-captions, so names and terms may be misheard) · Ali Abdaal, YouTube. Creator from the video's oEmbed data. Sponsored by Wispr Flow (captions: "Whisper Flow"). The A cut tool, FireCut, is one Ali says his team built in-house.

Gist

Ali, who edited his own videos for about three years, spends one public holiday learning AI video editing to make a 45-second launch video for Creator Grid, his company's creator-marketing platform. A human editor on his team, Parth (captions: "Path"), edits the same footage by hand in parallel. Ali runs three AI routes side by side in separate Claude Code sessions on Opus 5.5: DaVinci Resolve Studio driven over MCP, Hyperframes, and Remotion. The one-shot attempts fail at the A cut. What works: a short scripted re-shoot, a manual A cut, then AI-built "motion plates" composited over it.

One video, self-scored. Every rating is Ali's own. He calls the final result "about 97%" of his human editor, but in the closing exchange Parth's cut is called "better than this stuff" (speaker unclear in captions). No viewer or performance data. Tool names come from captions and are not checked here.

Takeaways

• Video editing, broken down: import, cut mistakes into a clean A cut, add B-roll, animate the B-roll (zooms, pans, transitions), then music and sound design. Taste sits over all of it: what story to tell, what to cut.
• Two ways AI makes video. Drive a real editor over your footage (Resolve), or write the video as code that renders every frame (Hyperframes, Remotion). Ali tried both at once.
• One-shot scores (Ali's): Hyperframes 7/10, Resolve 3/10, Remotion 2/10. Resolve "screwed up the A cut," leaving bad pauses. Remotion was "super buggy" but ships Remotion Studio, a free local browser editor.
• The task was unfair. He asked the AI to find 45 seconds in about 5 minutes of rambling A-roll and cut it with J and L cuts. He'd never give a new human editor that test, so he re-shot a tight script Claude wrote from the old transcript.
• Two factories, one compositor. Stream one: A cut of real footage. Stream two: motion plates, short pre-rendered clips (3 to 8 seconds) of animated product UI with transparency. A third step only places plates over the cut. Resolve drops out of the AI loop; the A cut is "the easy part."
• A cut in the end was manual. FireCut made a rough first pass in Resolve, Ali finished it by hand, then transcribed it with Whisper for the plate prompts.
• Contact sheets and storyboards before renders. Reviewing stills takes seconds. Ali swapped flat-color placeholders for AI-generated UGC-style photos at this stage.
• Late rebrand was cheap. His co-founder sent a new logo at about 90% done. One prompt restyled the design system and re-rendered every plate. By hand, that means redoing each graphic.
• Cost and effort (Ali's claims): about 6 hours, "about 20 shoted," nothing on top of his Claude subscription. He did buy DaVinci Resolve Studio for $295 that morning, which the "didn't cost anything" line leaves out. The Mac ran hot. Early on, Claude Code showed 3% of the session limit used.
• Polish passes: he moved plates to picture-in-picture, Loom-style, because he disliked full-screen graphics, and asked Remotion to drop its "AI sloppy" gradients. Flaws left in the final cut: loud background music, a few flash frames.
• Closing view: "human plus AI" is the sweet spot for now. Ali's wish: dump footage overnight on a local-model machine and hand editors a rough cut.

His five learnings

1. Treat the AI like a human. Give it the task, and the level of instruction, you'd give a human.
2. Learn the words professionals use. Knowing "motion plate" (and earlier, "contact sheet") let him ask for exactly what he wanted.
3. Get the AI to show the plan before it builds. Fix a storyboard, not a final render.
4. For a short video, film a short script.
5. When the video is code, changing your mind is cheap.

Tools named

Grok (research), Claude Code with Opus 5.5, DaVinci Resolve Studio 21 with its AI/MCP connector, Hyperframes (captions: "Hen Hyperframes," possibly HeyGen, not checked), Remotion and Remotion Studio, ffmpeg, whisper.cpp, Canva (image generation), Epidemic Sound (music and SFX), FireCut for Resolve, Whisper transcription.

Patterns

• a one-shot attempt exposes the gaps in your instructions ← "then you see the holes in your"
• brief an AI as you would brief a new hire ← "treat the AI like a human"
• learn the field's vocabulary so requests can be exact ← "learn the words that the professionals use"
• review a cheap preview before the expensive build ← "show you the plan before it builds"
• shape the input to the output instead of asking the worker to select ← "film a short script"
• when the artifact is generated from code, revisions cost little ← "changing your mind is super cheap"
• split independent work into separate streams, then a step that only combines ← "a third step that only composites"
• the first 80% comes fast, the last 20% eats the time ← "polishing that final 20% takes freaking ages"