ghost-editor

An AI video editor that lives inside your coding agent. Send it a raw video of yourself talking to camera. Get back a finished reel for Instagram, TikTok or YouTube Shorts.

Paid editor vs ghost-editor

Same raw recording. On the left, the edit I paid a human editor for. On the right, ghost-editor after seeing that edit once.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/312f6910-a8a0-4424-9dd4-612cd079a2e7

What it does for you

• Cuts the mess. Keeps your best take of each sentence and removes the pauses and false starts.
• Adds captions timed to every word, placed so they never cover your face or the app's buttons.
• Adds motion graphics: numbers, cards and animated text that pop up right as you say them.
• Adds sound effects and music, mixed so your voice always stays clear.
• Checks its own work before handing you the video.

Two ways to pick a look

1. Choose one of 7 styles

style	feels like
clean	bold captions, quick zooms, nothing distracting
editorial	soft lowercase captions and full-screen stats, like a news explainer
meme	emoji, reactions and punchy sounds
cinematic	film look, black-and-white B-roll, elegant type
launch	app windows and phone chats, made for product launches
kinetic	big words flying across the screen, you in a small circle
pop	giant words behind you, bright colour blocks

2. Show it a reel you love. It studies how that video was edited (the cuts, captions, animations and sounds) and edits yours the same way. Like the result? Ask it to save the look as your own style.

Get started

You need Claude Code on a Mac (Linux should work too).

1. Install. Paste this into Claude Code:

Install the ghost-editor skill: clone https://github.com/kurbaitaev/ghost-editor into ~/.claude/skills/ghost-editor and follow its docs/INSTALL.md.

It installs everything it needs and tells you when it's ready (a few minutes).

2. Edit. Start a new Claude Code session and say something like:

Edit ~/Downloads/my-video.mov into a reel in the pop style.

Make my video look like this reel: ~/Downloads/reel-i-love.mp4

Same video, but cinematic, and make it safe for TikTok.

Want the "show it a reel you love" option? That part uses Google's Gemini to watch the reference video. Get a free key at aistudio.google.com/apikey, and Claude Code will ask for it during setup. The 7 styles work without it.

Questions

Does it cost anything? ghost-editor is free and open source. Everything runs on your computer, except the optional Gemini step, which has a free tier that covers occasional use.

What videos work best? Vertical phone videos of one person talking to camera. It isn't made for screen recordings.

Which languages? Tested in English and Russian.

Can it make something new? Yes. Ask for a new style or a new kind of animation and it writes one. Three of the seven styles were made that way.

Other agents? It works with Codex and any agent that can run commands. See INSTALL.md.

Under the hood

Whisper for transcription, OpenCV for face tracking, HyperFrames for rendering, and royalty-free Mixkit sounds and music. Details: HOW-IT-WORKS.md.

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Built by @kurbaitaev on X. MIT licence.