Buck

After five months of me, Buck, being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we're finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast.

I think it came out pretty well.

We discussed a bunch of interesting and under-discussed topics and I'm glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history.

Tell your friends.

Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one.

You can watch on YouTube here, or as a Substack podcast.

We wanted it to snazzily cut between shots depending on who was talking.

But I don't truly in my heart believe that it's that important for the video editing to be that good, and I don't really like the idea of paying a video editor.

But I also don't want to edit the 4 hours of video myself.

And it seemed to me that video editing software was generally not optimized for the kind of editing I wanted to do here, especially automatically cutting between different shots according to which speakers are talking.

Surely, I decided, it wouldn't be that hard to just write some command-line video editing software from scratch, with the aid of my friend Claude.

So that's what we did.

We, which henceforth means me and Claude, first used DeepGram to make a transcript of the podcast that includes timestamps and a note of who's speaking.

Then we generated IDs for all the different lines in the transcript, leading to a huge file that looks like this.

There's a code block here in the text.

We wrote code that lets us edit the podcast by copying and pasting those lines around.

We also wrote code that automatically generates cuts between the different shots using crappy heuristics that Rob Miles tells me are bad.

The DSL compiles to a giant from PEG command, which is then executed to produce the final product.

This process produced the video and audio for almost all of that podcast, with the exception of the intro, which Rob Miles kindly sat down with me to manually edit in a real video editor.

Things I learned from this process Claude Code had a lot of trouble getting from Peg to work.