OpencutAI shipped an AI Co-Pilot that edits videos for scene detection and YouTube chapters.
Hey everyone!
Three major features just landed in OpenCut AI and they all run locally on your machine.
1. AI Co-Pilot Agent
This is the big one. Tell the editor what you want in plain English and it creates a step-by-step plan, then executes it.
Examples:
- "Make this a 60-second vertical reel with captions and trending music"
- "Remove all silences and filler words, then normalize audio for YouTube"
- "Add cinematic color grading and auto-duck the background music under speech"
How it works:
1. You describe your goal
2. The AI analyzes your current project (tracks, clips, transcript, duration)
3. It returns a multi-step editing plan with 19 possible action types
4. You review each step, then click Execute
5. Steps run sequentially with live progress — cancel anytime
We added 6 quick presets for common workflows. The whole thing runs through your local LLM — no cloud, no data leaving your machine.
2. Client-Side Scene Detection
Detect visual scene changes (camera cuts, angle changes, lighting shifts) without sending a single frame to a server.
How it works:
- Extracts frames at configurable intervals (default: every 0.5s)
- Computes 24-bin RGB color histograms for each frame
- Calculates chi-squared distance between consecutive frames
- Flags changes above threshold as scene cuts or dissolves
- Shows before/after thumbnails for each detected scene change
All processing happens in the browser using Canvas API. No backend needed.
3. YouTube Chapters Export
We already had auto-chapter detection (AI analyzes your video and finds topic boundaries). Now you can export them directly in YouTube's `MM:SS Title` format:
```
0:00 Introduction
1:23 Why Privacy Matters
3:45 How to Self-Host
7:12 Q&A
```
One click copies to clipboard. Also generates a full YouTube description with your suggested title, description, chapter timestamps, and tags.
Why this matters
Every feature runs locally. Descript sends your video to AWS. CapCut sends it to ByteDance. Runway sends it to their cloud. OpenCut AI keeps everything on your hardware — your footage, your AI models, your rules.
Self-host on a $20/mo server or run it on your laptop. MIT licensed.
What would you want the Co-Pilot to do next? 🎬
Replies
The local-first approach is honestly the most interesting part here. People want AI editing features, but more creators are starting to care about privacy, ownership, and not uploading hours of footage to the cloud.
Local-first AI editing is a smart angle, especially for creators who are experimenting with drafts they don’t want uploaded everywhere. The plain-English plan/execution split also feels important: people need to see what the agent intends before it starts rearranging a timeline.
The review-before-execute step is the right safety valve. One thing I’d want next is an “editorial intent” layer for the Co-Pilot: preserve the speaker’s pacing, keep awkward-but-human pauses, favor tighter social cuts, don’t overuse zooms, etc.
For creator workflows, the scary version of AI video editing is not just bad edits — it’s edits that slowly erase the creator’s style. If the plan preview can show which choices are being made for speed vs voice/style, that would make the agent feel much more controllable.
The local-first approach is honestly the most interesting part here creators care a lot about privacy and avoiding huge cloud uploads. The AI Co-Pilot also feels genuinely useful since it’s focused on real editing workflows instead of just flashy demo automation 🚀
Free AI Video Editor OpenCutAI
@gerald__brouillette Yeah, thanks a lot.
local-first is probably the most interesting part here. feels like most AI video tools became “upload everything to our cloud and wait”, so running scene detection + copilots locally is a pretty strong direction
also like that the agent executes an actual editing plan instead of just being a chat interface pretending to edit videos
Free AI Video Editor OpenCutAI
@abhiram5 Exactly, I'll run it as OS