vcut

name	vcut
description	Cut silences, filler words, and dead air out of a recording and render a clean master, reproducibly. Use when the user has a raw screen or camera recording, a meeting-recorder or podcast audio track with no video, mentions cutting silences or filler words or dead air, asks to clean up a take before publishing, wants an edit decision list from a video or audio-only source, or asks to trim pauses out of a talking-head recording. Also use when a recording needs a technical pass for clipping, black frames, or frozen frames before it ships. Do not use for story ideation, caption styling, subtitle translation, or publishing to a platform.
allowed-tools	Bash(vcut:*), Bash(npx @crafter/vcut:*)

vcut

Cut dead air out of a recording, reproducibly. Agent-first CLI over ffmpeg: it proposes cuts as data and renders only what a human approved.

Install: npm install -g @crafter/vcut (needs ffmpeg and ffprobe on PATH)

Start here

This file is a discovery stub, not the usage guide. Before running any vcut command, load the real workflow content from the CLI:

vcut skills get core        # the session flow, the round, presets, approval boundary

That is the whole always-loaded document, and it is deliberately small. The reasoning behind each command lives in sections you load only when the question comes up, so a two-minute clip does not pay for the deep dives an hour of footage needs:

vcut skills list                          # every section, with what it answers
vcut skills get core --section cut        # one section, on its own

The CLI serves skill content that always matches the installed version, so instructions never go stale. The content in this stub cannot change between releases, which is why it just points at skills get core. Do not assume the section list in an old copy of this stub is current either — vcut skills list is where it comes from.

The shape of the work

Every edit ends at the same artifact: an EDL a human reads and can disagree with before any file is written. vcut edl build writes it as draft, every segment proposed; vcut render previews it freely and refuses a master until a human approves it.

How you get from a raw recording to that EDL is a session: vcut open once, then peek, cut, and commit per round, with rounds --diff saying what each round changed. Every finding reaches cut whatever coordinate system it arrived in — a transcript line by its nearestRef, a raw position by --start-ms/--end-ms. The stateless detect -> edl build -> render pipeline underneath it is an escape hatch for a one-off cut or a script with no working directory, not the default. vcut skills get core carries the current shape of the work, verb by verb; do not treat the command list in an old copy of this stub as current.

Two rules that matter before you run anything

Nothing self-approves. vcut edl build writes every segment as proposed and the EDL as draft. vcut render --mode master refuses until a human changes that. There is no --yes. Never mark segments approved on the human's behalf.

detect finds silence, not filler words. A word list cannot tell filler from ordinary use and never survives a new language, so filler words are proposed by a model through vcut semantic, like every other judgement call.

Introspecting the contract

vcut schema             # which commands have a contract
vcut schema detect      # the field-by-field output shape, versioned
vcut doctor             # check ffmpeg and ffprobe before transforming anything

JSON is emitted automatically when stdout is not a TTY, so you never need --json. Data goes to stdout, diagnostics to stderr. Exit code 2 means the invocation was wrong, 1 means the run failed.

Full documentation

https://vcut.crafter.run/docs

Cutting is a loop, not a command. Silence removal is the first round of several: each class of defect only becomes visible once the one before it is gone. vcut skills get core carries the procedure, the invariants that say when it is done, and what has already been tried and failed.