Project Origins

I proudly present to you my video and audio cutting tool. Smart Media Cutter has been in the making since early 2024 when I wanted to switch from doing AI research into doing more applied AI engineering.

At the time I was pretty frustrated with AI research in general and was thinking about making some videos about my experience. Those videos never materialized, but I did come across Descript, a tool for editing videos through transcript. I used to make gaming videos for YouTube and the editing was always my least favorite part of the process. I thought that a tool like this should be very useful in the editing process.

However if you go on Reddit to r/Descript it seems like people aren’t having a good time with it. Descipt also has monthly subscription model, which I don’t like for my software.

The timing was good since I was looking for an AI adjacent project to do and this gave me enough motivation to start. Now, admittedly there are other tools for the job, such as new versions of Resolve Studio. However I can still easily beat Resolve Studio in price and UI learning curve. Not everbody wants or needs to learn how to use nonlinear video editors.

Editing 6-7 hour streams into something with less downtime is not fun for me. I think a lot of streamers and podcasters can relate.

Another point of pride for me is the video cutting without recoding, which I believe to be better implemented here than in any of the competing offers. Key part of this is implementing the low-level video/audio frame wrangling yourself. Open source alternatives like LosslessCut let FFmpeg to do all the editing so they can only do what FFmpeg does.

Dissing video editors for being FFpmeg frontends is a bit of a thing on HackerNews

For Smart Media Cutter, I’ve implemented my own muxer with the excellent PyAV library. Some of the benefits of this approach are faster exports, no temporary files that take disk space during the export, more control over the timing of video/audio frames and better HEVC support. One day I’ll go more into details about all of this.

At this point the tool has not seen much real use yet, although I’ve of course tested it extensively during the development. I hope I can soon get some feedback from users and make a roadmap for all the things that need to be added in. I have a lot of ideas but prioritization is key.

If you have any feature requests or ideas for development be sure to reach out either on Discord or through Contact us page. I’d love to head from your and the first users have a lot of power to modify the tool to suit their workflow. I hope to hear from you.

Long live Smart Media Cutter!


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *