qalarc.com / projects / clipforge

ClipForge

A project by Qalarc — AI systems studio, Sydney, Australia. Built, shipped and maintained by Qalarc.

One command turns raw footage into a scored, shot-aligned edit plan: local whisper transcription, ffmpeg+numpy computer-vision shot profiling, GLM-4.7-Flash highlight scoring with verbatim hooks, and CMX3600 EDL / CSV / review-page exports for DaVinci Resolve, Kdenlive and Premiere. No cloud, no telemetry. Drone-ready via Gyroflow.

PythonOllama GLM-4.7-Flashfaster-whisperffmpegNumPyGyroflow CLIyt-dlp

ClipForge fuses two upstream ideas into one local pipeline: AutoClip's highlight intelligence (coverage-first outlining, multi-criteria scoring, hook extraction) and Shrimply's editor-first philosophy (the cut list is a first-class artifact that hands off cleanly to a real NLE). Both upstream repos were code-audited before building — no hostile code found, no code copied.

How it works

  1. Ingest — a local file or a YouTube URL (yt-dlp download).
  2. Transcribe — faster-whisper runs locally with word-level timestamps and emits SRT.
  3. See — a computer-vision pass detects every shot boundary (ffmpeg scene detection) and profiles motion energy, focus (Laplacian variance) and exposure per shot with numpy.
  4. Understand — the local GLM-4.7-Flash (Ollama) extracts a coverage-first topic outline, scores every topic 0–100 on information value, emotional resonance, shareability and structure, and lifts verbatim hook quotes.
  5. Plan — AI highlights merge with the shot map: cuts snap to shot boundaries and speech gaps, never land mid-shot, durations clamp to 15–90 s scaled by score.
  6. Hand off — CMX3600 EDL for DaVinci Resolve / Kdenlive / Premiere / FCP, CSV cut list, and a static review page with thumbnails, scores and hooks.
  7. Render — instant stream-copy cuts or frame-accurate re-encode, 9:16 vertical crop, subtitle burn-in, auto-compilation.

No speech in the footage? A visual-only fallback builds candidates straight from the shot table — built for ambient and drone footage. For aerial work, ClipForge pairs with Gyroflow's CLI (DJI/GoPro gyro metadata read automatically).

Everything runs on-device: zero telemetry, no cloud calls — the optional Z.AI GLM fallback activates only if you export ZAI_API_KEY.

Tags

#video-editing#computer-vision#local-ai#highlights#drone#edl#whisper#offline
Source code (GitHub)Project pageInteractive project card

Status: active · First built: 2026-09-22 · Last updated: 2026-09-22