Cutbolt for Claude Code

Edit recorded footage with Claude: cut talking heads and interviews, add captions from a transcript, adjust loudness, and export finished videos, as saved, reversible edits on your own machine. Cutbolt is a local video editing engine for AI agents; this plugin gives Claude its MCP tools and six workflow skills (captions, talking-head recuts, multi-camera interviews, screen tutorials, delivery and review, and the general cutbolt skill).

This repository holds the Claude Code plugin and its eval cases in evals/. Cutbolt itself, its source and its docs are at skulitom/Cutbolt.

1. Install the cutbolt engine and put it on your PATH. The skills follow Cutbolt's main branch, so the matching engine is cargo install --git https://github.com/skulitom/Cutbolt --locked (needs a Rust toolchain). A prebuilt archive from Cutbolt's latest release is quicker; check it against SHA256SUMS. It can be older than the skills.

2. Put FFmpeg and ffprobe on your PATH. Cutbolt bundles neither.

3. In a terminal:

   claude plugin install cutbolt --marketplace skulitom/cutbolt-plugin
   

   Or inside Claude Code: /plugin marketplace add skulitom/cutbolt-plugin, then /plugin install cutbolt@cutbolt-local.

4. Restart Claude Code in the folder that holds your footage. cutbolt doctor checks the setup.

If you already added the cutbolt-local marketplace from skulitom/Cutbolt, keep using it, or remove it first (claude plugin marketplace remove cutbolt-local): both marketplaces have that name and hold the same plugin.

Then ask in your own words, for example: "Put captions on talks/demo.mp4 from talks/demo.transcript.json and save a captioned MP4 next to the original."

• What it runs: the plugin starts cutbolt --workspace <the folder you opened in Claude Code> mcp from your PATH. Cutbolt runs FFmpeg and ffprobe for media work, and, only if you have set one up, a local speech-recognition runtime for transcripts.
• What it reads and writes: only files inside that folder; files outside it are refused, so copy footage in first. It saves edits as revisions, writes outputs under new names and never overwrites your originals. It keeps its own state in a .cutbolt/ folder there (the session store, the job queue, a cache and scratch files). Ducking, loudness measurement and transcription briefly copy audio to your system's temporary folder and delete it after.
• What it sends: the plugin sends nothing itself. Cutbolt runs on your machine and needs no account or hosted service.
• What it may fetch or change: the plugin downloads nothing. If cutbolt isn't installed, the skills tell Claude to offer, with your agreement, to install it as in step 1: build it with cargo install --git https://github.com/skulitom/Cutbolt --locked, or download the release archive from GitHub, check it against SHA256SUMS, extract it and add its folder to your PATH. They also ask you to put FFmpeg and ffprobe on your PATH (or set CUTBOLT_FFMPEG and CUTBOLT_FFPROBE); they name no download source for them.
• Platforms: exports run as background jobs, which need Windows or Linux. The release also has a macOS build, but macOS isn't a verification platform.
• Eval cases: evals/ holds test cases with mocked replies for claude plugin eval. Claude Code never loads them when you use the plugin.

If no cutbolt_* tools appear, cutbolt isn't on your PATH. Install it as in step 1 and restart Claude Code.

MIT. See LICENSE. Privacy: it runs on your computer and sends nothing. Report a security problem privately, as SECURITY.md says.