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

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!

da_grift_shift2• 13 days ago

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

selfhoster11• 13 days ago

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

yieldcrv• 13 days ago

it also worked

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

happy to know, thanks!!..;)

arnab777• 13 days ago

Ya, a demo video would be nice .

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

On it sir.

KaseKun• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

That was the goal. Thankyou btw.

devolving-dev• 13 days ago

What's the benefit of SSEs here?

chrisweekly2• 13 days ago

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!

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

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

xgulfie• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

Facts!!!

chrisweekly2• 13 days ago

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

spottedmarley• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

noted.

heresalexandria2• 13 days ago

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.

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

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

faangguyindia• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

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

mikert89• 13 days ago

you can just give claude code access to ffmpeg

spacemanspiff01• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

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

vanilagy2• 13 days ago

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

genxy• 13 days ago

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

vanilagy2• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

[flagged]

dang• 13 days ago

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.

JeremyHerrman2• 13 days ago

PSA stop putting bigco IP in your project names!

has clawdbot taught us nothing?

doctorpangloss2• 13 days ago

is "Notepad" a bigco IP project name?

JeremyHerrman2• 13 days ago

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

tidbeck• 13 days ago

Guess it is efficient for attention.

brazukadev• 4 days ago

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

armcat• 13 days ago

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.

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

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.

hotpartition• 13 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 13 days ago

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.

PlkMarudny• 11 days ago

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.

ronak_parmar21• 10 days ago

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

ronak_parmar21• 10 days ago

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).

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

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