WeCut

WeCut

WeCut is a free, open-source video editing engine for AI agents. The agent writes a small JSON project; wecut renders it with the FFmpeg already on the machine. It cuts, captions, reframes and mixes short-form video, and it can analyse a video that went viral and reuse its format as a template on new footage. CLI and MCP server. No cloud, no API key, no GPU, no telemetry.

Things you can ask an agent that has WeCut:

• "Cut this 40-minute podcast into five vertical clips with karaoke captions."
• "Add word-by-word captions to talk.mp4 and put the music under it, quieter when he speaks."
• "This TikTok went viral. Work out why and make the same kind of video from my footage."
• "Turn these 8 photos into a 9:16 slideshow on the beat with a title."
• "Save this edit as a template so we can do the same every week."

npx -y wecut doctor                           # is FFmpeg ready?

npx -y wecut guide # the full guide for agents npx -y wecut probe media/talk.mp4 # duration, size, fps, audio npx -y wecut validate project.json # errors with JSON pointers and fix hints npx -y wecut preview project.json --at 1,5,9 # small JPG frames to look at npx -y wecut render project.json # out/clip.mp4 npx -y wecut mcp # the same, as an MCP server on stdio

Every command prints one JSON object on stdout. Exit codes: 0 ok, 2 invalid input, 3 missing dependency, 4 render failed, 5 over a limit.

Visual editor for humans

WeCut Studio is an independent static web editor. Choose local clips, trim and reorder them, add text and music, then download a portable template for an agent on another device. Editing runs in the browser; rendering runs on the agent's computer. A public editor needs only static file hosting, not a rendering server. A localhost URL itself is not public.

Run python -m http.server 8770 --bind 127.0.0.1 --directory studio from this checkout and open http://127.0.0.1:8770. No build or backend is needed. The template file is shared through your agent chat; public template storage and project autosave are not included. Bundle import requires the 0.2.0 source/build; published npm 0.1.0 does not include it yet.

Install in your agent

The quick way, for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf and Grok Build:

npx -y wecut setup           # shows what it would change

npx -y wecut setup --apply # registers the MCP server and the skill, backs up each file it edits npx -y wecut setup --remove --apply

It only touches the clients it finds (or --client codex,cursor), keeps every other setting as it was, and reads each file back. Quit Claude Desktop before you run it: while it runs it can write its settings back and drop the entry. Run it again after updating WeCut, so the installed skill stays current. Or do it by hand:

WeCut needs FFmpeg 6 or newer with libass (npx -y wecut doctor checks it and says what to install):

• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install -y ffmpeg
• macOS: brew install ffmpeg-full (the slim ffmpeg formula has no libass; WeCut finds ffmpeg-full on its own)
• Windows: winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Then connect it to the agent you use. The MCP server works in a fixed workspace folder (--root, default: the folder it was started in); every media path is relative to it.

Claude Code

claude mcp add wecut -- npx -y wecut mcp

Or as a plugin, which also installs the WeCut skill:

/plugin marketplace add 13kailouis-stack/wecut

/plugin install wecut@wecut

Any MCP client

Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Roo Code, LM Studio and most other clients take this block in their MCP settings file. Give --root explicitly, because desktop apps start servers from an unpredictable folder.

{

"mcpServers": { "wecut": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "wecut", "mcp", "--root", "/path/to/workspace"] } } }

VS Code (Copilot agent mode)

code --add-mcp '{"name":"wecut","command":"npx","args":["-y","wecut","mcp"]}'

or in .vscode/mcp.json:

{ "servers": { "wecut": { "type": "stdio", "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "wecut", "mcp"] } } }

OpenAI Codex CLI

codex mcp add wecut -- npx -y wecut mcp

or in ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.wecut]

command = "npx" args = ["-y", "wecut", "mcp"]

Gemini CLI

gemini extensions install https://github.com/13kailouis-stack/wecut

Agents with a terminal

WeCut targets any agent with permission to run local programs and access the user's media. Product names do not determine compatibility: a terminal agent can use the CLI without MCP.

Grok Bot, Manus, Muse, OpenBot, Dots and Claude Duet are examples of requested integration targets, not a list of tested integrations. For each product, verify that its execution environment can run the WeCut binary and FFmpeg. A chat interface alone does not provide that access.

npx -y wecut guide     # read this first: workflow, project format, templates

npx -y wecut doctor

Then follow the guide: probe, write project.json, validate, preview, render. In a fresh Linux sandbox install FFmpeg first with sudo apt-get install -y ffmpeg.

Clients that can launch a local MCP process can use wecut mcp over stdio; the client-specific examples above are not an allowlist. An HTTP-only MCP client needs a separate bridge: WeCut does not currently serve remote HTTP MCP. Browser-only agents need an execution environment before they can render. Node is needed for the npm launcher; a standalone binary does not need Node.

Agent Skill

The skill in skills/wecut/SKILL.md teaches the workflow to agents that load skills (Claude Code, Claude apps, Codex, Cursor and others):

npx skills add 13kailouis-stack/wecut

Other ways to get the binary

• npm (Node 16+): npx -y wecut , or npm i -g wecut. npm installs only the binary for your platform (@wefluence/wecut- - ); there are no install scripts.
• Binary: download the archive for your OS from GitHub Releases and check it against SHA256SUMS.
• Source (Go 1.22+): go build -o wecut ./cmd/wecut

Prebuilt for Linux, macOS and Windows on x64 and arm64. Set WECUT_BINARY to use your own build through the npm launcher.

What it does

• Cut, join and speed up clips (0.25x to 4x), with 9:16, 16:9, 1:1, 4:5 and other canvases
• Cover crop with a focus point and zoom, or contain on a colour or blurred background
• Photos with Ken Burns motion
• 36 transitions (FFmpeg xfade), clip fades
• Text with 31 styles (news cards and labels, bubble, fire, Bebas titles, Kanit caps, elegant serif, script...), 40 bundled fonts (Poppins from Medium to Black with real italics, Kanit, Bebas Neue, Luckiest Guy, Creepster, Abril Fatface, Great Vibes and more), 18 caption styles, emphasised words in another colour, pop / type / slide / fade animations
• Colour fades over the footage and under the text (gradients), like the dark fade behind captions
• Footage in a card on a plain or grid background with rounded corners (inset), colour washes for a stretch of the video, captions that light up word by word (reveal) with key words set apart (accent)
• Captions from a transcript: phrase, karaoke (spoken word highlighted) or one word at a time. Transcript times can stay in source-file seconds; WeCut maps them through the cuts
• Image overlays (logos, stickers) with opacity, rotation and fades
• Music and sound effects with trim, loop, fades and automatic ducking under speech. Renders are loudness-normalised toward −14 LUFS (--no-loudnorm skips it)
• Colour filters and effects (flash, cinema bars, frame, dim, night, sepia)
• Analysis of an existing video: shots, pace, hook length, flashes, tempo and beat sync, pauses, platform outro, and a frame sheet the model can look at
• Templates ("recipes"): the shape of an edit, applied to new clips, words and music; save your own from any project
• MP4 (H.264 + AAC, faststart) or GIF output

Clone a video into a template

wecut clone media/viral.mp4 --name news-card   # -> recipes/news-card.json + out/clone/news-card/compare.jpg

clone turns a finished video into a template the way an editor would have built it: every cut and transition (flash, fade, dissolve, zoom, blur) at its exact time, each shot's framing (full screen, or shown whole on black or blurred bars) and push-in, the text cards with their colours, box, size, line spacing, padding, timing and entrance (fade, pop, slide or type), the caption style and position, the logo, and a talk that already plays under the opening B-roll. A steady beat is stored as beat indexes; recipe apply snaps those cuts onto replacement music. Each shot is a media slot, like a CapCut template. WeCut holds no model and no API key: it returns a review with the images and evidence behind each finding, and the agent running it looks and answers, so words, fonts, what each shot is and the kind of each transition come from real eyes and OCR is only a fallback. The comparison sheet puts the original beside the template filled with numbered stand-ins, so a person or a model can check it at a glance. People fill the slots in WeCut Studio; agents with wecut recipe apply. Details and the format: docs/clone.md. Cloning needs the 0.3.0 source/build; the published npm 0.1.0 does not have it yet.

Analyse a video, reuse its format

wecut analyze media/viral.mp4                 # shots, pace, hook, flashes, tempo, pauses + a frame sheet

wecut recipe list # templates: built-in and the workspace's recipes/*.json wecut recipe apply --input request.json # recipe + new clips, words, music -> project wecut recipe from-project my-edit.json --write recipes/my-style.json # "save as template"

analyze measures what a model cannot see in a transcript: where the cuts are (a white flash or a strobe counts once), how long the opening shot holds, whether cuts land on the beat, and whether the file ends with a silent platform outro. Its frame sheet, one frame per shot with timestamps, is how the agent reads the headline card, text style and framing.

A recipe (wecut.recipe/1, schema in schema/wecut.recipe.schema.json) is an edit's shape without its content: sections fed by roles (a 5 s hook with a headline card, then the body), text slots filled at apply time (with emphasis for the words to colour), caption and music style, effects on cuts. A recipe can carry its own default track, like a CapCut template; the music passed at apply time replaces it and "none" drops it. The built-in recipes copy the structure of formats that are common on Indonesian short-form video today: news-style reposts with a headline card, quote hooks, phrase-captioned vlogs, punched-in podcasts, photo slideshows.

Copy the structure, not the content: other creators' footage, wording and music stay theirs.

MCP tools and prompts

| wecut_render | renders M