Show HN: Alys – Chat GPT for video editing

2 points

3 months ago

Hey everyone, I run a video editing agency for real estate agents (but I’m not a video editor). So I hired video editors to edit the videos for me which works pretty good. However I struggled with the delays in getting edits done, people taking days off and overall workload getting too large.

So I’ve spent the last two months building Alys - Alys is an agentic video editor: There’s no timeline, you literally just chat to make edits to the videos. ChatGPT for video editing basically.

My honest reflection on the tool at this point:

The good: - Good output quality is possible, but it takes the right prompts. It feels a bit like Claude code when it first came out, there’s some signs of brilliance, but it’s very rarely in one shot. To back this up, I recently sold a $1k video package based on a video made by Alys. - The animated overlays work great - In my limited editing work, I’ve always struggled with creating text that looks good and meets the ‘vibe’ of the video. Alys can create animations and text reveals from specific descriptions which look better than any templates I’ve used in other editing software - It saves time - I just added ‘templates’ which basically means at the end of an editing/prompting session when I am happy with the result, I can save this as a template. Then the next time I want to make a similar video, it can use this video result as inspiration.

The bad: - Alys still requires some thought from the user to create good videos (prompting matters). Coming back to the early Claude Code/Cursor days - the prompt you give Alys is important. It’s easy to forget now that Claude Code can one-shot complex features, but 12 months ago you’d have to write an elaborate prompt and then iterate 5-6 times to get code that complied. The same is true with Alys - she can create good videos, but just requires good prompting - Speed: maybe I’m just impatient, but waiting 2 mins for an edit feels too long for me. There’s a real trade off between speed and quality of results which I’m still trying to balance. Claude Code can work for 10 mins on a problem and I don’t mind as it will often be 95% of the way there after the first iteration. Alys needs to get as good.

The future: - I believe the real unlock is to give Aly’s video engine more options for creativity, and truly expand to allow her to have all the features available in a modern video editor. - As well as improving the examples and prompting she receives to truly let show her what video editing looks like across difference styles.

Anyway I’d love for some feedback and for you to try it out. I have a free plan with sensible limits (sadly video rendering on GPU’s is expensive, so there is a paid option).

Thanks!