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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that it was written because the author much prefers writing code and automating tasks to video editing, and it was worth the extra time for them to do that.

Out of curiosity, do any commercial video editing programs offer automation/scripting? That seems like a great place for scripting to be available to help alleviate common tedious tasks, if it's not already there. I think that could lead to a best of both worlds.

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Yes there are many existing automation options for video production applications. For example, the concept of a portable EDL (edit decision list) file is already well established in the industry for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_decision_list

Scripting languages are also available for specific post production applications such as Final Cut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FXScript

Then there grew a whole crop of cloud-based scripted content generators like stupeflix, sundaysky, idomoo.com.

I think the author did a great job creating a fun project and explaining the ffmpeg workflow, but a video professional has many off-the-shelf options already.

descript is the only thing I’ve seen that turns video editing into something resembling word processing - it gets very jump cut-y and jerky but most people are used to it in the TikTok/YT era.

It’s terrifically buggy right now but as a PoC it’s amazing.

oh, and scripting wise you can fully automate davinci with python.

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