How I Fully Automated my Video Editing Process! (Premium YouTube Videos) transcript

This entire video, the motion graphics, these animations, and even these illustrations was edited entirely by Claude and Hicksfield. Now, over the last few months, my feed has been flooded with videos saying AI just killed video editors. And every time I clicked one, I saw the exact same thing. Trashy, lowquality AI slop. So, I spent the last 60 days mastering everything there is to AI video editing. and I developed a secret five-phase workflow that turns raw, boring videos into premium YouTube animated videos.

Using this exact same workflow, I took this raw video over here and turned it into this, a fully ready animated premium YouTube video. And don't worry if you've never edited anything with AI before, or you think that this is going to be very expensive. This video is a complete a toz guide and the entire video cost me less than $100 to make. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how the workflow works, how we generated premium animations that look this good, and the exact cost and time breakdown of everything.

And make sure to stick around because at the end of the video, I'm going to show you every animation that Claude generated for this video. And I promise you, you won't believe that it's been made with AI. And it all starts with phase one, cutting the silences and bad takes. Everyone already knows how to do this, so let's run through it very quickly. When you record a RAW video, it comes baked with silences and bad takes in it.

And these need to be removed before we can edit anything. There are a bunch of AI tools that can already do this for you, but after testing a bunch of them, it seems that Glink is the best one. All we have to do is boot it up, drag our files in, then click add [music] script, and paste in the script of the video. Glink then goes through the entire video using the script as a reference to know what to keep and what to cut out of the video.

And this is what it spits out, the full video with every silence and bad take removed. Now, I'd still advise you to watch through it one more time and tweak the pacing so that it feels as natural as possible. And once that's done, you just need to hit export as an MP4. And now you have a raw video with no silences and no bad takes. All right, enough of the boring stuff because before we create the premium designs and the premium animations, we need to talk about the phase that's more important than both of them.

What separates a good YouTube video that keeps you hooked from the rest of the boring ones is simply this, the content planning. Let me explain. A raw talking head video is boring to watch. Yes, there's value in what you're saying, but the truth is no one wants to stare at a boring recording of you just speaking to the camera. This is why we use animations. They do two main things. One, they give the viewer visual stimulus that keeps them watching.

And two, they highlight the important value that you're saying. A scene where you mention a statistic does not hit as hard as a scene where the viewer can see that statistic. So, here's what we did. We fed Claude a detailed breakdown of how I planned out every single video on this channel for the past 3 months. every script, every animation, and why we placed each animation where we did, how it hooks the viewer, and how it keeps them watching.

Then we even gave it courses from inside of Ultimate Editors on how to plan out videos like a professional editor. The beauty of this is that Claude is just like a brain. You can feed it these PDFs and it's going to study them and learn the patterns to good editing planning and it's going to use the same logic to plan out [music] your own edit. So Claude turned all these PDFs into a skill called the editor brain skill.

It can read scripts and plan out what needs to be shown on screen and when to keep the viewer hooked just like a professional editor. Quick side note, we packaged this exact skill and 13 other high-quality editing skills into a plug-in called the Ultimate Editor plug-in. It can create crazy animations so that you don't have to spend months training your own clot. It's linked down below. But let's get back to the video.

So, here's the real secret to premium videos. Take a look. This is the script of my video. I feed it over the claude and I tell it to use the editor brain skill to plan out my video just like a professional editor would. Now take a look at what happens. Since this skill is highly trained, it knows that it has to plan out four to six animations per minute for the intro and two to three animations per minute for the body.

So for the intro, it highlighted the crucial parts that the viewer needs to remember and planned exactly what needs to be on screen to keep him hooked. Right here, it planned a graph scene to hook the viewer in. And right here, it planned a statistic scene to emphasize the numbers and obviously many more. This was perfect. Then for the body, every time it felt that the viewer was about to get bored, it extracted value from the script and planned an animation for it to keep the viewer hooked.

Here's a quick example. In this section, I mentioned how viewers get bored watching boring videos. It planned an illustration scene to show exactly that. And here, when I mentioned how AI can learn on its own, it planned this highquality UI scene that shows exactly that. It's literally applying the same logic I used to plan my videos to this script. So, we ran this skill for the full script. And this is what we got. A detailed plan of every single animation that needs to be on the screen and exactly when so that our viewers stays hooked throughout the entire video.

Now, keep this plan in mind because later in the video, I'm going to show you every single animation that we planned out created. So stay tuned. But at the end of the day, a plan is still just a plan. Now, we need to turn it into the visuals, which brings us into our next phase. Phase three, generating the images. Now, with the detailed plan of what animations need to be in the video, the next phase is generating the designs.

But here's the thing. Claude right off the bat doesn't know what good design looks like and everyone's brand is very different. Sometimes you're working with a clean yellow style. Other times your client uses a blue tech style design. So here's what we do to get Claude to generate amazing designs that are on brand. Previously we fed Claude a bunch of design fundamental courses from Ultimate Editors so that it can understand the basics of good design like spacing, fonts, and colors.

And real quick, the editor brain, this design skill, and the animator skill that you're about to see are all packaged inside of the Ultimate Editors plug-in. And there's like 13 more highquality editing skills that we trained Claude on inside of this plug-in as well. The Ultimate Editor plug-in is inside of our AI editing fundamentals course at Ultimate Editors. We also have full courses where we show you how to use this plug-in to create an Imani style edit, a Vox documentary, and premium short form videos.

If you want your claw to be highly trained for video editing, click the link down below and check out the AI editing fundamentals course at Ultimate Editors. Now, for this video, I wanted to use blue themed animations. Why? Well, my brand color is blue and the lighting in my background leans towards blue, so it just made sense. So, I taught Claude what highquality blue designs look like. I loaded up Pinterest and I searched for blue UI designs and I spent about 1 hour collecting over 100 highquality blue designs. premium blue UI, premium blue posters, and even UI themed illustrations.

By the end, I had a folder of over 100 premium blue designs that fit our brand perfectly. Now, I fed this folder over to Claude, and I told it to study the placement, the color, the fonts, and everything design related in these images, and it turned all of that into the blue designer skill. Now, watch how this works. Claude looks at the animation plan, extracts the animation that it needs to create, and then uses this designer skill to create a hyperdetailed prompt to Hicksfield about how the design needs to be created.

Now, here's the best part. We also upload into Claude a folder with all of those inspirations we collected from Pinterest, and it actually goes through that whole folder, picks the reference image that fits our prompt best, and attaches it to the prompt in Hicksfield. So, Hicksfield receives an optimized prompt written by Claude and a reference image to follow. Because remember this, Claude is the brain and Hicksfield is just the machine that executes.

So that's exactly what I did. I ran the skill and I told Claude to generate the designs for the entire video. It took every single animation planned. It used our design skills to prompt Hicksfield and even included a reference for what every generation needs to look like. And this is what it came back with. There were mainly four kinds of scenes in the videos. First, anytime I mention statistics, it generated clean graphs like these and highquality bar graphs like these.

Second, when I mention important phrases that were crucial for the story, it generated dark textcentric scenes that looked beautiful. Third, anytime I told a story or an example, it created illustrated story style scenes that made you feel this example. This blew my mind. And finally, fourth, anytime I explained a complex concept, it generated white UI designs that explain it visually. By the end, it had generated 41 premium designs that were all on brand.

And they were all generated because of one premium design skill. And as good as these designs look, just wait until you see them when they're animated and they're brought to life in just a moment. Because now it was time to turn these designs into animations that we could use in the video, which is where things got crazy. Phase four, creating the animations. This is what we all came here for. To teach Claude how premium animations are made, we went through hundreds of iterations in our Vog style courses and our Iman Gaji style courses.

We created animations over and over again. Each time getting better results and each time Claude improving its animation skills with us. And then Claude packaged everything it learned about creating high-quality animations into the animator brain skill. A skill that understands camera movement, text animations, and stylized animations just like a professional editor. So we then prompted this skill with our animation principles.

For our textcentric scenes, we told it to always start with a quick camera zoom in. Have the words pop up with a wordby-word pop-up fade in sequentially. And you're going to see why this was important in just a second. For the [music] statistics, we need quick rigid camera movements and animating the graphs in slow motion as if they were in a slower world. This is what gives it the smooth graphic feel. For the UI scenes, we animate the UI with a clean bounce and fade the text in smoothly.

This is what makes them sharp and smooth. And for the illustrated scenes, we keep the characters subtly moving at all times and have the camera always interacting with the scene, pushing in or pulling out. [music] This is what made them feel real. Now, Claude took these principles and applied it to all 41 of the designs. For each one, Claude references the design in Hicksfield. Then it writes a very detailed prompt based on what kind of design it is and based on the animation principles that we just told it.

[music] So, a UI design gets a UI style animation prompt and an illustration gets a totally different one. I did this for each of the 41 designs that we generated and generated 41 premium animations that were all in our style. Now, I promised you guys that we would take a look at these animations. So, let's go ahead and do that. For the six statistics that show up in the script, these are the animations Claude created.

Just look at these graphs drawing out in slow motion while the camera moves. This looks like something straight out of a premium finance documentary. For the three textcentric moments, these are the animations we generated. Just watch how the words pop up word by word [music] as I say them. For the 19 stories and examples that were mentioned, these are the illustrated scenes fully animated. The characters never stop suddenly [music] moving and the camera keeps pushing into the scene.

This is my favorite style in the video. And for the 21 concepts, these are the UI animations. Look at the bounce and look at how premium the designs all look while visually explaining everything. Now, I'll be honest with you, not every generation was perfect. Some animations came out wrong on the first try, so we reran it again with a fixed prompt, and it looked better. And that's the reality of AI. You have to direct it over and over again until it delivers.

Now, by the end, we had a folder of 41 premium animations custom made for our video that all fit our branding. These were just waiting to be added into the edit. Now, we're just about to assemble everything and show you what the final premium video looked like. But before we do that, let me talk to you for just a second. If you're an editor watching this, chances are you're probably stuck exactly where every student starts.

You know your way around Premiere Pro, but your edits don't look premium and high quality. You're stuck creating basic edits and you're struggling to get clients or even get paid for video editing. That's exactly what Ultimate Editors fixes. Inside, you get step-by-step courses on Premiere Pro and After Effects so that you can learn the editing programs. Then you get all four viral editing styles of 2026 broken down step [music] by step.

And most importantly, you get our AI editing fundamentals course with the ultimate editors plug-in so that you can start creating Iman Gaji edits and Vox documentaries using only AI. And to top it all off, you get the $2,000 per month editor blueprint. The exact system that our students are using to make more than $2,000 per month with video editing. In 90 days from now, you could be creating premium animations just like our students and getting paid thousands of dollars every month to edit videos.

We used to charge $497 for all 300 plus courses. But today, you can get access to all of them for just $97. The link is down below. Join and let's make you a viral editor and get you paid $2,000 per month. But okay, let's get back to the video. It's time for the final phase, assembling the video. At this point, AI has cut the video, planned out the animations, designed the scenes, and animated all 41 premium animations.

The final piece of the puzzle is assembling all of this into one premium video that flows together nicely. Just take a look at how easy this is to do. First, I drag my cutup video from Glink into Premiere Pro. Then, I watch through the video and add in every animation Claude and Hicksfield created using this table that Claude made for me as a reference. It tells me exactly which animation goes at which time stamp. And after that, I just add in a few final touches.

I added in some zooms between the animations and the a-roll. These are all presets, so it's very quick. And they really just help blend the cuts so that nothing feels rough. And then I added some sound design. The animations already come sound designed by default from Hicksfield. So all I add is whooshes and risers to transition in and out of the animations. These little sounds are what make the edit flow. And finally, music.

I have a folder full of songs I always use. I drag a few music tracks in. I drop their volume and it's done. And just like that, the full video is complete. But before I show you the full video, the question that everyone has been asking, how much did this whole thing cost and how long did it take to make? Take a look at this. For the designs, we generated 41 premium designs for all 41 of the animations. Each image cost four credits using GPT image 2 at 1K resolution.

That's 164 total credits for all of the designs for the video. Then the animations, the big expense. 41 total animations, most of them were 5 seconds or less at 1080p using Cance 2.5. Each animation costs around 45 credits, putting the total credits used for the animations at 1,800 credits. Altogether, this is 2,000 total credits for the full premium edit, which in USD puts the total video cost at just under $95. To put that into perspective, a normal video like this would typically take around 7 days with 6 hours of animating done per day, and would typically cost around $400.

But we only spent $95 in order to create it. And take a look at how fast this was. Phase one, the cutting, took 25 minutes. The cut itself was done in like 5 minutes, but the rest was just quality control. Phase two, the planning, took 15 minutes. Claude ran the skill and process the full script. Phase three, the designs, took around 45 minutes. We ran Claude once and just waited for the generations to come in. And phase four, the animation, took just over an hour.

All 41 of the animations fully rendered out while we did nothing. Finally, phase five, the assembly, is actually the one that took the longest. It took around an hour and a half putting together the animations, adding the zooms and the music and sound effects. So instead of seven days, this full video was created in just over four hours for just $95. Now I spent some extra time quality controlling everything just to get the best results, which added on an extra 2 hours.

So less than 25% of the price and more than 40 times faster. And the result is a premium talking head video that's ready to be posted. And that's the part that I need you guys to understand. Claude on its own can't do any of this. Trashy AI slop is what happens when AI runs with no direction. But an editor who knows content psychology, design, and how to direct AI, that's the editor that just created this premium video in 4 hours for just $95.

And that's the editor that clients are going to want to hire moving on in 2026. That's the editor that clients will pay $400 for this video as he turns it around in just under a day for $95. The future of editing is editors that can turn around videos faster and better using AI. And it all starts by learning how AI video editing works. Now, for what I promised you, if you guys want to watch the full video, it's actually posted on this channel.

The video is called, "Is it still worth it to learn video editing in 2026?" And you can go watch it right here. And after watching it, just ask yourself honestly, in just 4 hours for only $95, isn't that impressive? Thanks a lot for everyone watching this video and making it to the end. Let me know down in the comments below what you guys think of AI. And if you're excited to learn more about how AI is going to help change video editing for the better, stay tuned because we have a lot of tutorials dropping.

In the meantime, you can feel free to check out one of these two videos over here. Thanks a lot for watching. See you guys in the next video.