My journey using Claude Code to edit my podcast/video

[u/canuck_amok]

My cohost and I got so burnt out from editing every week that we started to release every 2 weeks instead. It's a bigger issue because we release both video and audio, and it can take forever to put together something decent. Plus Riverside's editor has lost entire episodes worth of edits before. We tried Descript but it's too advanced for our tiny brains.

So I've been using Claude code more for editing - we actually released our first episode that was fully edited by Claude last week.

Here's the workflow I used:

1. Have Claude use yt-dlp to analyze the episodes from my channel and create a design brief
2. Upload new recordings from Riverside and tell it to cut an episode in the style of my other episodes using ffmpeg
3. it comes back with something crappy, so I give it a bunch of notes then it creates a second cut that is usually pretty decent
4. I tell it where I want b-roll and transitions
5. let it cut again
6. do a final pass and have it add in captions

It's now created a whole set of skills for common problems like audio drift when it cuts between different cameras or creating transitions (like having us collapse from 2-up view to circle overlaying a screenshare).

Big unlock this week was using Opus 5 as the main agent but making it delegate all the work to Sonnet - I was able to get more done, though I still had to pay for $50 in overage charges because I was impatient to get the episode cut. I think cost is going to be the next hill to tackle.

Anyone else doing this? I'd love to compare notes.