My Full AI Video Editing Setup: Claude Code, Claude in Chrome and GitHub

Every single YouTube video on this channel for the last few weeks, including this one, was edited by Claude Code. I didn't drag a single clip on a timeline. I just film it and tell Cloud where the files are. And then, after about half an hour, I get a review page where I leave notes on the exact things that I want changed. It works the same way as when I worked with a human editor.

The only difference is I save about $300 on each video. And I'm doing all of this on the $20 a month Cloud subscription. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the whole setup so that you can follow along on your own computer. What you need to install, how I give Cloud my brand guidelines so that every video looks like it's part of my brand, and how I use GitHub so that Cloud remembers every bit of feedback that I've ever given it, and the next video that it does are only better and improved. And by the way, all of the prompts that I use are going to be in a free starter kit, uh linked in the description of this video.

You're only going to need five things to do this. The first one is Claude Code subscription, and you will need the desktop app for it. The second one is Cloud in Chrome, the browser extension, which lets Cloud use your browser the way you would, and that's how it finds B-roll for me, and I'll show you how to set this up in a minute. The third is a handful of free tools that do the actual video work for you, like FFmpeg, which cuts and renders the footage, and Whisper, which transcribes what you say with the exact timestamps for every word. Now, you don't need to know what any of them are because Cloud will install them for you.

And I've put the list of everything it installs in the free starter kit. The fourth is a GitHub account, which allows you to store all of the code somewhere. Think of it like a Google Drive, but for code. If you use a particular font style or a LUT file for your color grading, it will remember your preferences. And every change that you make or a mistake that Claude keeps repeating, and it means that each new video that you make is going to be better than the last one.

And then the final one, it which is optional actually, is going to be DaVinci Resolve. There is a free version which works really well, and I'll tell you exactly when you need it because I use it for longer form videos. The way I use Claude Code versus using Claude plus DaVinci is that for anything over 20 minutes, I use DaVinci. So for example, when I do the podcast editing, the files that I have are 60 GB from each camera. So it's a massive amount of footage.

Therefore, if I was to ask Claude to just edit it by itself, it would just not be able to do that and the credits would just burn. But when it comes to my 15-minute YouTube videos and shorts, I've just been using Claude Code and I've tested it. It works better than using DaVinci that's connected to Claude. If you have those longer videos that you want to edit, you just need to go to settings, connectors, and add DaVinci Resolve. So let's set it up together.

You need to make a folder on your computer called something like video editing and then open Claude Code in that folder and Claude will need to install a few things before it can actually edit things. So you don't have to do any of it yourself. You just need to explain to Claude that you want to edit video and it needs to check what you need to install for editing, transcription, and B-roll. And for it to install anything that's missing without needing admin rights. And then just ask it to transcribe a 10-second clip so we know that it's working.

And when your test clip comes back as text with a timestamp on every word, you're ready. And the exact list of things that you will need is in the starter kit, so you can grab it from there. The next thing is what's going to make your videos look like they're yours and not like everyone else's AI edit. Inside your project, make a folder called brand and put in it everything a human editor would ask you for. Things like your brand guidelines, which could be a PDF if you have one, with the fonts that you use, your logo, your colors, and if you shoot things in a flat color profile, the LUT files that you use.

And then ask Claude to read it all and write it down as rules. Mine is something like this, and I didn't actually write them all at once. Most of them came from the notes that I gave on early in the videos, and I'll show you in a minute how to make sure that they're saved and used each time you edit a new video. The last bit of setup is one text file, which I call my YouTube edit playbook. It's basically the brief that I would give a new editor.

How I film, what I want cut, how fast the video should be, what the graphics should look like, and what I hate. Here is the start of mine. You don't need a perfect one to start. Just write five lines and let your feedback fill in the rest. So, here's a real edit from start to finish.

I film everything in one long take, and when I mess up a sentence, I just say it again without stopping the camera. Then I open Claude Code, and I say something like this. Here is the rule file for my new YouTube video. Read my playbook and my brand rules first. Transcribe it word for word, then find the appropriate B-roll, and build me a review page once you have done editing.

The best thing about Claude doing the editing is the fact that I no longer have to source the B-roll, and this used to be the slowest part of editing process for me, because every time I mentioned a website, a tool, or a video, I had to go and find it, screenshot it, or screen record it, then crop it, and drop it in at the right second. But now Claude just does all of it, because it's able to read the transcript and make a list of every moment where I mention something that could be shown, with the exact second when it's needed. And then, because it has Claude in Chrome, it actually goes open those pages, um and sources its own B-roll. It's able to open real websites, close the cookie banners, scroll to the right page, and record it. If I talk about someone's YouTube video, it goes to YouTube, finds it, and records the bit that I'm talking about.

If I mention a tool, it takes the official logo from the company's own website instead of just a blurry one from Google images. And if I say my screen recordings are in downloads, it watches that and picks the exact right moments to use it. And setting it up is super easy. You just need to Google Claude in-browser and install it as an add-on to your Chrome. Step three is the review page and the upload pack.

And this is the part I set up that changed absolutely everything. Because it's where I actually spend my time now. When I worked with editors, they would send me a link to their draft of the video in frame.io. And I would watch it, pause it, and leave a comment on the exact second I wanted changed.

So, I asked Claude to build me the exact same thing. It's a little private webpage with the video on it, and it's made with Claude artifacts. So, it lives in my Claude account and opens in any browser, even on my phone. And the video on it is a small fast preview, not the full 4K render, because there is no point waiting an hour for a full render of a draft you're going to change anyway. I watch it, and whenever something is off, I just pause and type a note, and it's saved at the exact timestamp.

And if the note is about a whole section, I can mark a start and an end point. If it's about something on the screen, I can actually draw a box right on the frame and say, "Move this graphic here." Or, "This is covering my face." And all the notes show up as little markers on the timeline. So, I can see at a glance where the problems are.

And the best thing about it is that I don't send them one by one. When I've watched the whole thing, I press one button that sends all of my notes to Claude together. And it goes through every single one, and the next version appears on the same page with a version picker. So, I can flip between version one and version two and check that each note was actually fixed and the changes that it has made between the two versions. If you want to set this up on your own, this is roughly what I ask.

Then just add the last line to your playbook so that it happens on every video without you having to ask. Now, once I approve the review, Claude does the full quality render and then it prepares what I call the upload pack, which is everything that I would otherwise spend another evening writing. It reads the final edits, not the original script, so everything matches what's actually in the video. And it gives me a few title options, the full description with the chapters and timestamps, all the worked out from the edit, the links to everything that I mentioned, including a track link to the lead magnet so I know which video people signed up from, the tags, a pinned comment, and it also makes five thumbnails options using my brand colors and a reference photo of me. And those go on the same review page, so I just click the title, the thumbnail I like best, and choose those.

So, my part of the whole editing process now is just filming, leaving notes, and then picking the thumbnails and title options that I like the best. Now, let me show you how to set up GitHub so that Claude remembers your feedback each time you give it. And this is the part where a lot of people skip and it's the reason my edits get better every week instead of just starting from zero every time. You see, when you start a new conversation with Claude, it doesn't remember the last one. So, if you were to tell it to use a particular sound effect, it's not going to actually remember that the next time that it makes another edit for you, unless it's written down somewhere it can read.

And GitHub is a perfect place to keep those files because it has a full history of every change, so nothing ever gets lost and you can use it from any computer on any Claude session. And you don't need to know how GitHub works to set this up. You just need to make a free account and then you need to connect the Claude to GitHub. And you do that by going into again settings and connectors and connecting the GitHub. You just need to tell Claude to create a private GitHub repository for you and you ask it to put your playbook, your brand folder and any editing scripts in it.

And you shouldn't upload any video files there. And that last part matters because your raw footage is huge and it doesn't belong on GitHub. So only the instructions and the scripts go up, never the actual videos. Mine is organized really simply. There is the playbook file, the brand folder, a tools folder with the scripts that Claude has written for captions, graphics and colors.

And then one small folder per video with its cut list and its notes. And here's the habit that makes it all work. Whenever I give a note that I would want on every video, not just a particular one, I say remember this and add it to GitHub. So when I told Claude, "When you show logos, just show the logo, no text next to it." It pushed it to GitHub and I never had to say it again.

That's literally how a good to human editor gets better at working with you. Except this one writes it all down and remembers it. Now let's talk about a few best practices so your first edit is good. And these are some of the things that took me the most rounds of feedback to figure it out. So if you give those to Claude from the start, you'll skip a lot of pain and save a lot of credits.

The first one is to ask for word-for-word transcription including the ums and the restarts. Because normal transcription quietly tidies up your repeats and then Claude can't see them and cut them out. The second is to tell it to never cut off the end of a word. In a regular transcript, it will say that the word ends at a certain moment but the S in a business keeps going a little after that. So, you need to ask Claude to let every cut run until the sound has actually faded.

And this was my most common note until I added it to the playbook. The fourth is always review a preview. Because full quality renders take ages sometimes, and you almost always have some feedback to give. The fourth is that when I talk about a tool, I want to see the actual tool. So, I tell Claude to use real screenshots and real recordings first, and only make something with AI when there's generally no real footage.

The fifth is to give feedback like you would do to a person. You don't need any special prompts. You just say this feels slow, or that graphic is covering my face, or this looks too green. I want it warmer like my thumbnails. Those all work really well.

Let's talk about the cost and the mistakes that it makes. So, the $20 plan. The reason it's enough is that the heavy work, the actual rendering of the video, happens on your own computer, not inside Claude. What Claude spends his actual usage on is reading the transcript, planning the edit, and writing the scripts. And that's much lighter than people expect.

To be honest about the limits, on a long editing day, I do sometimes hit the usage limit and have to wait for it to reset. And long podcast episodes are where that happens the most. Rendering also takes as long as your computer takes. So, an older laptop will be slower. And Claude still makes mistakes.

Sometimes it picks the wrong take, puts a graphic over my face, and once used b-roll that didn't really match what I was saying. But, the thing is, I'm not editing anymore. I'm just reviewing, and reviewing takes me 10 minutes instead of actually sitting down and editing the video for 3 days, or hiring a freelancer and paying them $300 for it. If you want to try this yourself, just grab the free starter kit linked down below. It has the full list of everything Claude needs to install, the exact prompts from this video, a starter version of my playbook that you can edit, and the GitHub folder structure so that you can have your first edit running this week.

I hope this video was useful, and if you want to learn more about the editing process, creating brand guidelines, and making AI videos, you can sign up for the course that I created, which is starting on the 1st of November. I'll see you in the next one.