Five AI video editors

I’ve been trying every single AI tool out there to see what’s best for my video editing workflow. And something that I’ve realized is that the best AI video editor out there just depends on the kind of video that you’re editing. Here are 5 that I’ve tried and what I actually like about them.

Number 1 is just straight code like Python and FFmpeg. If you don’t know, FFmpeg is a free software that you can use to edit videos, manipulate video, audio, whatever with text commands in your terminal instead of the timeline. I’m using it to cut, trim, speed up, crop, even add captions, color grade, clean up audio, EQ, the entire thing.

And a lot of times, plain FFmpeg is not only way faster, it can be way more token efficient and generally easier to give the model feedback.

However, it is extremely annoying to use when you want to make small tweaks that you could have just made on a video editing timeline. That’s because to see the results, you’re gonna have to wait for the entire video to re-render.

I think it’s great for quick edits, color grades, audio processing, short form lo-fi quick edits. FFmpeg sometimes gets the job done, and you don’t need anything else.

Second is HyperFrames. I think it’s great for animation. This is a free tool, open source by a company called HeyGen. Like a lot of these other tools, it’s turning code into video with the base of this being just straight HTML, and agents are really good at it because they know how to write HTML.

They’ve also released recently a new HyperFrames Studio, which is like a straight up video editor. You can hook it up to Claude and ChatGPT. Right now, I’d probably stick to using it for animation because that’s what it’s best at.

Number 3 is this new one called Palmier. This is like a proper video editor that they’re building out here. It’s a startup. It’s not as robust and built out as other video editors because they just got started, but it has great MCP support, so it can connect with Claude and ChatGPT and your other AI agents.

And one of the nice things is that it is pretty fast for a lot of basic edits. It can do most of the stuff that you would need for editing talking head videos, short form videos, adding captions. If you’re slapping on a LUT or something, it can do all that sort of stuff.

I had really no problems with Palmier. I just think there’s some basic table stakes that they’re building out just because other video editors are just so robust. And one of the nice things is that you can work on multiple edits at a same time.

Next up is Diffusion Studio. This is also free and open source. This can also run in your browser, but they also have a native app that you can download. The UI is really nice here, and one of the cool features is their art boards, which I think is great for repurposing content, resizing things. So if you’re trying to take like a 9 by 16 video, make it 16 by 9, it’s pretty good.

Diffusion Studio, I don’t know, maybe I just didn’t set it up properly, but I tried a lot and the agent was just struggling a little bit with it. Also, it’s a tad buggy. It’s missing some features here and there, but the UI is really great and it’s open source. You can actually go download it and just like tweak the software, if you want, for your own use case and like customize it, and they have examples on how to do that.

And then we also have DaVinci Resolve for proper video editing. Obviously, DaVinci Resolve is one of a kind for color, especially if you can get the skills right. It’s the editor that tons of filmmakers use. Claude can now control it. I still think that it’s not perfect because they haven’t exposed all of the full MCP support inside the DaVinci Resolve platform.

It’s still slower to edit some videos on this than compared to like Palmier or FFmpeg or one of these other tools. But if you’re native to DaVinci Resolve, you already use it, or you don’t mind using like an NLE where you’re working on like a bigger project, then I do think this is worth it to set up.