fireship-style-edit

OPEN VIDEO EDIT

The world's best AI video editing harness.

Hand Claude Code a raw talking-head clip and get back a finished, fully animated short: motion graphics, kinetic captions, real logos, real faces, reaction GIFs, live b-roll cards, rolling counters and a hyper-edit cut, all timed to the word you said. No timeline, no templates you drag around, no paid generation. Every frame is drawn in Python and rendered locally.

Built and battle-tested on the @KevBuildsApps / Creator OS channels, where it edits real videos every day.

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What's inside

Each skill is a SKILL.md playbook (the rules, sizes, timings and every lesson learned the hard way) plus the Python that does the work:

• scripts/
  • prep_talking_head.py: face-aware band crop that never ships a black bar, clean audio, and Whisper word timestamps (small.en, primed with your product names).
  • fetch_brand_asset.py: real logos from Wikimedia, simple-icons, GitHub or a site favicon.
  • fetch_figure.py: face-cropped portraits of the people behind a niche (Anthropic founders, OpenAI, Meta, GaryVee, Hormozi...).
  • fetch_giphy.py: Giphy search, downloaded as frame banks.
  • number_beats.py: finds every spoken number so it gets a counter.
  • fetch_footage.py (fireship): yt-dlp search → download (auto-updates on a YouTube 403) → 1 fps contact sheet → frame-accurate cut, with --crop for news picture-in-picture panels.
• templates/
  • hyper_edits.py: punch-ins, shake, whip cuts, 1–2 frame flash inserts, spring entrances, typewriter text, and a one-moving-stream-per-band lane guard.
  • light_fx.py: scanlines, HUD scan, neon floor grid, bloom, light hits, light rays and caption glow.
  • apple_counter.py: an iOS-style rolling odometer (SF Pro digits, carry, motion blur, live commas, year mode).
  • media_marks.py: GIF cards, logo badges, figure rows and spotlights, topic logo conveyors, a spinning globe.
  • claude_marks.py: the dancing Claude invader (look-at, grab, hold) and the starburst mark.
  • split_55_45_compositor.py / longform_engine.py / fireship_engine.py: the compositors.
• fonts/: Oswald Bold (overlays), Luckiest Guy (captions), Anton, Bangers, Space Mono, Inter, Press Start 2P.

examples/

Real render.py files from shipped edits. These are the best way to learn the style:

They reference their own assets/ and source/ folders, which are not included. Read them, copy the patterns, don't run them as-is.

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How an edit runs

clip.mov
  └─ prep_talking_head.py ──► band (1056×960 @30fps) + audio + words.json (word timestamps)
       └─ fetch logos / faces / GIFs for everything the transcript names
            └─ render.py: sections cut at spoken anchors, every beat t0 = the word's start time
                 └─ PIL draws each frame: slot (graphics + light fx + hyper-edit) + band + caption
                      └─ ffmpeg: 1080×1920 H.264, the ORIGINAL clip's audio, crf 16

The talking-head audio is the master timeline. Graphics land on the word (max 0.1s early), never while you're still winding up to say it. Final renders split into parallel chunks (RANGE=0:200 python3 render.py), and a 30s short renders in a few minutes.

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Install

You need Claude Code, Python 3.9+, and ffmpeg.

git clone https://github.com/kevinbadi/open-video-edit.git
cd open-video-edit
pip install -r requirements.txt          # pillow, opencv-python, numpy, openai-whisper, yt-dlp
brew install ffmpeg                      # or apt install ffmpeg

./install.sh                             # copies the skills into ~/.claude/skills
./install.sh /path/to/your/project       # or into that project's .claude/skills

Optional keys go in .env.local at your project root (see .env.example):

• GIPHY_API_KEY: reaction GIFs (free at developers.giphy.com).
• HEYGEN_API_KEY: only for split-animated-short avatar renders.

Use it

In Claude Code, from the folder where you want your projects:

edit this talking head: ~/Downloads/my-clip.mov
here's b-roll of what I'm talking about: ~/Downloads/screen-recording.mp4

Claude loads split-animated-talking-head, preps the band, plans the beats against your transcript, sources the logos, faces and GIFs, writes projects/<slug>-animated/render.py, checks preview frames for collisions, renders, and hands you a 1080×1920 MP4.

Long-form: "edit this landscape talking head". Faceless: "make a Fireship-style video about X".

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Platform notes

• Built on macOS. It uses SF Pro (counter digits) and Menlo (terminals) when present, and falls back to the bundled fonts elsewhere.
• No HTML overlay layer: every pixel is drawn in Python.
• Logos, portraits and GIFs are fetched at edit time and are not redistributed here. Pro