Introducing BetterEdits
A small Mac video editor built for Claude Code to drive. Free to download; analysing footage is the part that costs money.
BetterEdits is a video editor for the Mac that takes instructions. You open Claude Code in a folder of footage, say what the video should be, and the cut appears in the app while you watch. Then you fix anything by hand and press export.
It is free to download today. Here is what it is, why we built it this way, and what you pay for.
What it is
A small editor in the spirit of Instagram's Edits app: one magnetic timeline, video, audio, text and subtitle tracks, frame-exact trims, voiceover that ducks the music, seventeen text looks, eight caption styles, export at HD, 2K or 4K with HDR kept. Native Swift, so it opens in a second and scrubs 4K without a spinner.
Nothing in it waits on a server. There is no account, no sign-in, no library that swallows your footage. A video is a folder of three plain files, and your footage stays where you keep it.
Why an editor for an agent
Every editor assumes a person is dragging. That made sense when a person was the only one who could read a timeline.
An agent can read a timeline if the timeline is text. So we made the video a folder of readable files, gave the app a command line that lands every change as an undo step, and wrote a guide into every workspace so Claude Code knows how videos are made there before you type a word.
The result is an editor where the agent does the dragging and you do the deciding. For the videos most people make, a talking head, a demo cut into clips, a hook and three points, that is most of the work.
What Claude can and cannot do
It can cut by what was said, because the transcript tells it. Cut the pauses, remove the false starts, find the moment where you name the feature, caption every word. It can lay out a structure, put text on screen, fill slots from a folder of footage, and export.
It cannot watch the video. It draws itself frames and contact sheets to check its work, and that catches a caption under the UI or a cut on a blink. It does not have taste about a look. That part stays yours, and the editor underneath is a real editor for exactly that reason.
The next post goes into this honestly.
What costs money
The editor is free, every feature, every update. If that changes we will say so before it does, and your videos are plain folders that keep opening either way.
The one thing that costs us money to run is analysing footage. Claude cannot see a video, so a file has to be read once by our analysis service, which writes what it found next to the file: every spoken word with its timing, speakers, on-screen text, scenes, silences. That is what Claude cuts from and what captions come from.
Analysis is paid by the minute of footage, and a new account starts with $5 of free credit, about 25 minutes of video. You never set it up. The first time Claude needs the words in a file, it asks you to sign up and paste a key. From then on it analyses what it needs and tells you what it cost.
The format the analysis writes is open. Anything can read it, and anything can write it.
Where to start
Download it, make a workspace, and open Claude Code in the folder. The first tutorial walks the whole loop in twenty minutes. If something breaks, write to us; it gets fixed in the next build.
