I’m in the middle of redoing my systems. Lately my videos have been taking two weeks or more, so I challenged myself to make one in under a third of that time.

It got me thinking about ways to pull that off.

I’ve experimented with a lot of different tools. I use one that helps me with my rough cut. On the video that just came out, I was exploring other ways I could get AI to help me.

I was blown away at how much it was able to do.

The stuff I do on every video

Every video I make has the same list of tedious jobs. Adding text to screen. Re-timing things. Adding sound effects and changing decibel levels. My picture-in-picture animation, title cards, and all of that stuff.

That’s usually 3 to 5 hours of my time. This time, AI did almost all of it.

It looked at my recent videos, and I explained some of the rules I follow when I’m editing. Then it went to work inside Premiere. It placed things word by word and frame by frame, so everything landed exactly where it goes. It even added the typing sound whenever text animates on screen.

It wasn’t perfect. This first run had a lot of me giving feedback while it learned my rules. But it did the work in the background while I worked on other things.

You can see what it did in my latest video.

I haven’t fully built this out yet, so I can’t tell you exactly how long it’ll take. My guess is about an hour once it knows the rules.

I say “go,” work on something else, and come back to something that gets me 90% of the way there. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you run overnight.

This will give me another day back in my week, without needing to hire an editor.

Graphics are next

There’s a new development too. Claude Design just moved over to artifacts in the Claude desktop app, Claude Cowork, where I do all of my work.

That opens up the possibility for it to create your graphics and add them to your timeline too.

Steve, who’s in my community, is doing something similar in DaVinci Resolve. He gives it a script, walks away, and comes back to something pretty close to what he’d upload. He’s done that for a couple of videos now.

Build the jig once

A good system is like a jig in a woodshop. Building one takes an afternoon. After that, every cut comes out the same, and it’s fast.

The time you put into a system now comes back on every video after.

Your growth is directly proportional to the amount of time and effort you can put into your channel. Handing off the tedious stuff frees up time for the parts that need you.

So I’m constantly looking for ways to automate all of the things that don’t need me, and make sure it’s creating the thing I would have created.

It’s not about generating things or giving you the answer. It’s about saving you time by doing the work you don’t need to do.

How to set this up yourself

I set this up in Premiere. Your mileage may vary, but I suspect this would work for most video editors.

1. Write down every tedious thing you do on every single video. Text on screen, sound effects, decibel levels, title cards, picture-in-picture. That list is the job you’re handing off.
2. Give an AI assistant access to your editing software itself. Access to your timeline is what lets it place things down to the word and the frame.
3. Explain the rules you follow. When text comes on screen, which sound goes where, and how loud things should be. Pro tip: Have it look at your past few videos before you explain your rules.
4. Hand it your rough cut and let it do the work.
5. Check what it did and give it feedback. Every note becomes a rule it follows next time.
6. Turn the whole thing into a skill, so it runs the same way every time and you never explain it again. 🚀

Two more steps are optional, and probably overkill for now. You can run your footage through a rough-cut tool first. I use Gling to cut the dead space and flubs before AI ever touches the timeline. I'm looking for a better alternative. Give me some time and I know I can get this to be taken care of in Cowork as well.

You can also have AI design your graphics. That part is about to get a lot easier.

If you want to go even further, have it do the post-edit things too, like your description with chapters and even upload for you.

Ideation is the other big one

Editing isn’t the only system I’m working on. The other one with that kind of impact is ideation, using the Velio MCP, which lets AI pull straight from Velio. (That’s my affiliate link, so I get a small cut if you use it.)

That one’s still a work in progress, because I’m very protective of ideas. But I want to be a little more data-driven in the things I make and the direction I want to take my channel.

The decision-making is all me. They’re my ideas, based on how I like to find them. It just takes the manual part out of it. Instead of me going to do all of those things one at a time, it grabs everything and puts it in front of me.

Make sure you’re doing the thing you should be doing for your channel and your business right now. There was a point in time when building this would have been a distraction for me.

If that’s where you are, file this away for later. It’ll be here when it’s time.

Thanks,
Dave

P.S. When I get this polished enough and I’ve used it more, it’s definitely the type of thing I’d love to give to others. After the people in my program, the newsletter gets everything first. So you can bet on it landing here. :)

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P.P.S. I'm working on the next big upgrade to my program! More details soon.