I love editing videos.
I started working in video studios back in the late '80s, producing live concert videos for groups you've never heard of. The Kingsmen? Gold City?
Now the laptop on my desk has more power than that $250-an-hour studio ever did, and DaVinci Resolve Studio lets me release my inner video editor. I produce video for a couple of different projects as my day job.
These days though, I have to force myself to set aside time to fire up the editor and do even the easy edits.
I still enjoy editing videos. What left was my ability to carve out a chunk of my week big enough to get the job done.
All of that has changed now.
DaVinci Resolve ships with an API that Claude can connect to. I described the edits I wanted on two videos in the same project, then told Claude to build a pipeline of agents to handle it. It took a while. Now all I have to do is say "publish episode 104" and BOOM, it does it and I go off and do other things.
Notice what I asked for. I didn't ask for a video edit. I asked for the pipeline. Asking for the output gets you one video. Asking for the pipeline gets you out of the chair.
AI has gone from advising me about my work, to being my writing partner, to actually doing real work so that I don't have to. Handing it a document and a Slack conversation with my boss about the changes she wants made to it is old hat by now. This is real work and it does it well. But it hands me back minutes. The pipeline hands me back hours.
Minutes were never going to change my behavior. Nobody reschedules a ten-minute job three times.
Everybody tells you to automate the work you don't enjoy.
I still enjoy editing videos.
That was never the problem. The problem is that it needs a big block of my week, and my week stopped having big blocks open.
That studio used to cost me $250 an hour. For all that money, I still had to be in the room. That room is free now. And I don't have to be in it.
Open your calendar and find the thing you have rescheduled three times. That is the one. Now go build the pipeline that does it.
Originally posted on LinkedIn: "I love editing videos"