Hacker News Reader

This is pretty dang cool but I guess I was hoping to see some very clever use of vision and maybe waveform analysis to give the model "eyes and ears" to edit audio and video. V2

noted.

Reminds me of https://www.screenkite.com/ The AI powered video editors are fun.

yup but I had Premier Pro and Palmier Pro in mind while making it, hence the UI.;)

Cool concept, will try it out! I've had decent results with computer use operating conventional editing tools, but being able to directly edit JSON project files is a solid optimization and opens up a lot of opportunities with things like modular templating.

Thankyou. I am planning to make it opencode friendly too.. I think that would openup versatality and more experiments..;)

You should strongly consider using Mediabunny to do all of the rendering client-side!

I couldn't find a skill in your project that would help integrate mediabunny. The docs and examples look like they could really help. Having good example coverage allows agents to pickup libraries easily.

https://github.com/Vanilagy/mediabunny

Just point the agent at the docs, it'll understand them quickly. Mediabunny also has many examples and even a dedicated LLM page.

That genuinly good, I didn't know about the LLM page, I have opened an issue to track the WebCodecs/Mediabunny export (https://github.com/ronak-create/FableCut/issues/2)

[flagged]

Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

I apologise for the activity as some of my replies were AI-assisted. As I wanted to be precise and frame my idea accordingly. I'll keep the guidelines in mind and maintain the legitimacy of my comments and post.

Yeah I'm sure you need fable for the heavy reasoning task of editing tiktoks

My impression was that they made this editor with Fable, and its JSON project structure would only serve well for manipulation by lesser models.

Super cool, but maybe it is worth considering using OTIO format instead of the simple JSON for a timeline? LLMs are pretty good with handling OTIO.

I've looked at it and i've found thatit is more verbos for LLMs not less, curently the format is optimized for cheap agent patching, and OTIO support as an interchange adapter (not a native format swap).

Nice idea, let me give it a go-through. Thanks btw!!

I have no use for this, however I am stunned by the simple and effective solution of using json+sse instead of an API to allow agent interaction Amazing work

What's the benefit of SSEs here?

That was the goal. Thankyou btw.

A demo video would be good.

Yeah actually, that's a great idea, working on it ..(～￣▽￣)～

cool!

can this be used to make these style of videos from prompt?

Style 1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vGjrv2zjfsM

Style 2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6KoRHpAZ4zk

Absolutely, in fact just give it clips, voice and a reference video(optional), command it and wait untill it finishes..

demo is up, as promised: https://github.com/ronak-create/FableCut/releases/download/v...

its a real session, not staged: one prompt ("edit a reel from these assets"), claude code plans the cut for ~6 minutes, writes the entire timeline as one json document, and the editor is already live with it. the 24.5s reel it produced is also in the release, untouched: https://github.com/ronak-create/FableCut/releases/tag/v1.3.0

fittingly, the demo video itself was also edited in fablecut.

you can just give claude code access to ffmpeg

This looks great, will try it out. I had a crazy idea of doing a full agentic demo video narration and cutting, so might try your tool with some tweaks.

Thanks! That sounds like a really interesting use case. I'd love to see how it turns out. If you end up making those tweaks for full agentic narration and video cutting, feel free to share your experience or ideas, I'd be happy to learn from them and see if they could be incorporated into the tool.

Have you thought about integrating Remotion into this?

What do you think the next update will be about..^_~

Just watch out for their license...

Oh!! yeah that can be an obstacle.. no issues, I guess I found Mediabunny at the right time..

Love that the timeline is just JSON and the UI hot-reloads. Agents and humans on the same edit is the interesting part.

I have little experience with video editing; a tool like this might be an ideal path to learn more. Thanks for creating and publishing it and sharing here!

My pleasure. If you have any ideas, lets connect and make it more helpfuul!!

You aren't going to learn by having the AI do it for you...

Agreed. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. It was more about having every facet represented in JSON in one place.

Facts!!!

Ya, a demo video would be nice .

On it sir.

You should have a hosted site for this - It is entirely frontend - right?

almost! the editor/compositor is fully browser side, but the server is doing real work: project.json lives on disk (thats the whole point, any agent or script can edit it and fs.watch + sse hot reloads the ui), plus ffmpeg for the final export encode. so it needs the local server for the actual workflow.

a hosted demo mode is a good idea though, project in localstorage + sample footage + mediarecorder export would let people feel the editor without cloning. the one thing it cant show is the main trick, watching an external agent rebuild your timeline live, since theres no local file for it to edit. might do a stripped demo build if theres interest

Very cool project but having fable in the name makes it sound so tacky

The readme is full of compound Claudeisms, so why not ;-)

    per-shot energy

    frame-accurate

    word-pop

    reference-video

    CSS-@keyframes-animated SVGs render frame-accurately

That’s just how some humans write. These words didn’t come from an LLM vacuum.

>That’s just how some humans write.

Sure, but we can't handwave away every observation about LLM output with "(some of) the original training corpora came from humans". Qualitatively, the vibes are off™.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1uok58g/claudes_s...

https://x.com/emollick/status/2049894109318459798

Remember the gremlin thing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319285

Yeah I though so but as people are so fond of Fable.. This would give them a poke to just take a look..;)

Since people like an unrelated product, you thought it would be good marketing to jack the brand? Maybe I should start calling my B2B SaaS products Salesforce too!

oh, I read fable as a story, fable cut meaning you can stitch up stories which is a form of storytelling, so quite fitting for video editor

it also worked

happy to know, thanks!!..;)

PSA stop putting bigco IP in your project names!

has clawdbot taught us nothing?

what clawbot taught "us" is that it is a good strategy.

Guess it is efficient for attention.

is "Notepad" a bigco IP project name?

yes, microsoft does hold a trademark for notepad. As litigious as MS is I'm pleasantly surprised they've left notepad++ alone.

Unfortunately anthropic is actively eroding community goodwill in regards to potential IP conflicts:

https://abnormal.ai/blog/abnormal-response-to-anthropic-laws...

https://x.com/steipete/status/2016068265391354181

I made "qNotepad" in college, it's been on GitHub forever, never gotten any DMCAs or anything. Maybe they don't care that deeply?

Microsoft has a lot of trademark meant to protect them from agression rather than attack themselves

If MS can go after notepad++ then Bjarne Stroustrup can go after C#?

Haha the better question is can the notepad++ guy go after notepad++ (for mac)?

The name C++ is not trademarked, only the logo iirc.

Show HN: FableCut – A browser video editor AI agents can drive (zero deps)