open-edit

OpenEdit is an open-source, agent-driven editing pipeline that ships with VEED's HTML renderer — closed source, but free to use.

There is no GUI and no timeline. The pipeline is driven entirely through your coding agent — edit, cut, and reframe footage; layer motion graphics and visual elements; turn slides or websites into video; capture web pages; and pull in any video/image generating service or MCP server when it helps. Source video is optional: stills, slides, generated media, or pure motion graphics are enough when the brief calls for it. Be creative and fluid — try new ideas rather than collapsing every ask onto captions.

OpenEdit edits footage. Supply your own source files, or ask it to generate a talking-head clip with VEED Fabric when you have none — that spends credits, and never without your approval.

This launch video was made in OpenEdit — click it to watch with sound.

Requirements

Installation

Download this repo, or install via the command line with:

npx skills add veedstudio/open-edit

Agents

OpenEdit uses an agent-agnostic skill and repository guide. It supports Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini; the installed skill prepares the runtime and loads its AGENTS.md instructions explicitly.

Usage

Open your coding agent. For example, with Claude Code:

claude

then ask it:

Add subtitles to my video [VIDEO]

The agent will automatically transcribe your video, analyse the transcript, create a suitable design for your video, and then render it.

After 1-3 minutes, the agent will return your video with subtitles burned in, as well as launch a video previewer. It will also tell you where to find the final MP4.

You can then ask the agent for subtitle amendments, for example:

I don't like the yellow colour, make it darker

Move the text up a bit

When he says "go buy it now", make sure the 'now' really stands out.

You can also hand the agent a reference image to copy a style from:

Add subtitles that look like this [IMG-REF], to my video [VIDEO]

Examples

Real outputs, each with the prompt that produced it. Click any example to watch it with sound.

create viral subtitles with /open-edit and translate my video to 5 languages using VEED Lipsync 2.0 on Fal

One source clip, three languages, three caption styles:

Spanish	French	German

generate 3 viral hooks in Seedance 2.0 on Fal and create dynamic motion graphics using /open-edit

Three AI-generated hooks, three motion-graphic treatments:

use Figma MCP to study my BrandBook and create branded campaign graphics using /open-edit

One brand book, three campaign cards:

Renderer

Caption styles are authored in HTML and CSS. Rendering does not use a headless browser: there is no browser to install, launch, or keep alive for the duration of a render.

Internal benchmarks measured the renderer up to 2.2x faster than Chrome-driven renderers. These measurements are preliminary and not yet reproducible outside VEED; a documented benchmark and its methodology will follow.

The renderer is integrated but not required. Composition does not depend on it, so Chrome can be used as the render backend instead.

Transcription

OpenEdit asks once which provider to use and records the answer at the runtime root (.open-edit-prefs.json); it does not ask again. Every provider writes the same file — runs/<key>/transcript.json, with real per-word timings — and nothing downstream can tell which one ran.

VEED — best quality, and the default workflow. Requires a VEED account; usage limits are your account's, and a free account covers about 10 minutes of transcription a month, beyond which it needs a plan. The audio track is uploaded and stored in order to transcribe it; the video is not uploaded. By default OpenEdit does not create a VEED project. The agent guides the one-time browser login and stores a refreshable token at veed/.veed-token.json inside the runtime.

node --import tsx veed/login.ts
node --import tsx veed/go.ts /path/to/video.mp4

WhisperX — free, local and offline; nothing leaves your machine. Installed on request, and the first run also downloads a model. CPU-bound on Apple Silicon, with two quality tiers.

bash pipeline/scripts/install-whisperx.sh                  # on request, once
node --import tsx prep/transcribe.ts /path/to/video.mp4    # --model medium for the better tier

Your own service — produce a Whisper-family JSON however you like (WhisperX, openai-whisper, whisper-timestamped, mlx-whisper, the OpenAI API with timestamp_granularities=["word"], or whisper.cpp -oj) and map it. No credentials pass through OpenEdit.

node --import tsx prep/whisper.ts transcription.json /path/to/video.mp4

Per-word timings are required whichever provider you use: without them the caption reveals drift out of sync with the audio, so a transcript that has none is refused rather than rendered badly.

Scope and limitations

V1 targets captions. Motion graphics, charts, and brandbook-matched styling render today, but are less exercised than captions and should be expected to have rough edges.

Report defects through GitHub issues.

License

The editor is licensed under Apache-2.0. The renderer binaries are distributed under PolyForm Shield 1.0.0, which permits commercial use of the videos you produce with no payment to VEED. See LICENSE and NOTICE for the full terms.