QMM AutoEdit

A free, CPU-only auto-editor that turns raw video into upload-ready 9:16 Shorts or polished long-form cuts — automatic dead-air removal, word-by-word karaoke captions, and blurred-background reframe. It's an open, no-paywall alternative to paid Premiere auto-editing plugins, built on just FFmpeg and faster-whisper. No GPU required — runs on any machine that can run FFmpeg.

Features

• Dead-air removal — detects silence with ffmpeg silencedetect and stitches the loud parts back together, tighter and cleaner.
• Karaoke-style burned-in captions — word-by-word highlighted subtitles via faster-whisper + a hand-built .ass style (fully optional, degrades gracefully).
• Blurred-background 9:16 reframe — turns any source aspect ratio into an upload-ready vertical Short.
• Best-window auto-clip (--clip N) — Opus-Clip-style: scores audio energy and picks the highest-energy N-second window before editing.
• Three modes — short (Shorts/Reels/TikTok), longform (keep full length + aspect, just tighten and caption), clean (dead-air cut only, no captions).
• Zero required dependencies — pure Python stdlib + subprocess calls to FFmpeg. faster-whisper is optional and only needed for captions.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/respectfulnrespected59-source/qmm-autoedit.git
cd qmm-autoedit
./setup.sh
python autoedit.py RAW.mp4

See CLAUDE.md for detailed commands and architecture.

Prerequisites

• FFmpeg + ffprobe on your PATH (hard requirement)
• Python 3.9+
• Optional: faster-whisper (pip install faster-whisper) for captions and the --clip best-window finder. Without it, AutoEdit still cuts dead air and reframes — it just skips captions with a printed notice.

Usage

python autoedit.py RAW.mp4                          # short mode (default)
python autoedit.py RAW.mp4 --mode longform          # polish a whole long video
python autoedit.py RAW.mp4 --mode short --clip 60   # auto-pick best 60s window -> Short
python autoedit.py RAW.mp4 --mode clean             # just remove dead air, no captions
python autoedit.py RAW.mp4 --out my_edit.mp4         # custom output filename
python autoedit.py RAW.mp4 --no-captions            # force captions off

Mode	Aspect	Dead-air cut	Captions	Best for
short	9:16, blurred-bg reframe	aggressive (0.45s+ gaps)	yes	TikTok / Reels / Shorts
longform	source aspect, full length	gentle (0.9s+ gaps)	yes	polished long-form uploads
clean	source aspect, full length	gentle (0.9s+ gaps)	no	fastest tighten pass, no transcription

How It Works

1. (optional) best-window clip — scores audio RMS energy per second and keeps the highest-energy --clip N window (short mode only).
2. Silence detection -> cut — ffmpeg silencedetect finds gaps; the loud segments are padded and concatenated back into one continuous clip.
3. Transcribe the cut clip — faster-whisper (CPU, base model, int8) runs word-level transcription on the already-cut audio so caption timing lines up post-cut.
4. Karaoke captions — word timestamps are grouped and written to a .ass subtitle file with the current word highlighted gold.
5. Reframe + burn — blurred-background 9:16 scale/crop (short mode) or pass-through aspect (longform/clean), captions burned in via the ass filter, final libx264 encode.

Configuration

cp .env.example .env

The only setting is AUTOEDIT_FONT (default Impact) — the font used for burned-in captions. There are no API keys, accounts, or network dependencies to configure.

Performance

AutoEdit runs roughly real-time on a modern CPU (silence-cut + reframe are fast; transcription is the slower stage). It is not instant like a GPU-accelerated tool, but it is fully hands-free — no manual scrubbing, no timeline editing, no paid plugin.

Using with Claude Code

This project includes a CLAUDE.md that gives Claude Code full context on the pipeline and every flag.

claude    # Start Claude Code — reads CLAUDE.md automatically

License

MIT — see LICENSE

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

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Built by Quantum Melanin Media (QMM) — free, no-paywall creator tooling.