HACKER Q&A
📣 gneray

What AI can you use for personal video editing?


I have tons of videos of my family and kids. I would like to be able to use AI to trim them. My 6 y/o son asked me to add effects to a video of him doing parkour, and I so badly wanted to try.

But all of the main LLM providers I tried denied my request because it was against their policy. I managed to get Runway to do a light video edit but it was limited to 8 seconds total :(

I completely get where these policies comes from, but I'm also wondering if there's something out there for people like me. I would love the ability to upload a video, give it a prompt for what to change, and voila -- has anyone found anything useful here?

  👤 wei03288 Accepted Answer ✓
For family videos specifically, the challenge isn't just adding effects — it's that most AI tools assume you want polished social media content, not personal memories with a bit of cleanup.

A few things that actually work well right now:

1. *Subtitle/caption generation* — Most AI tools handle this decently. Upload your clip, get auto-generated captions. Useful for family members who watch on mute.

2. *Background music matching* — Some tools can analyze the mood of your clips and suggest/add appropriate music. Way better than manually browsing stock libraries.

3. *Basic cleanup* — Stabilization, color correction, removing background noise from phone recordings. These are the highest-ROI AI features for home videos.

The "generate 8 seconds of synthetic video" direction (Runway, etc.) isn't really what you want for family content — you want tools that enhance your real footage, not replace it. Look for tools that let you describe edits in natural language rather than requiring timeline manipulation.

👤 wei03288
NemoVideo does pretty much exactly what you're describing. It's an OpenClaw skill — you upload a video, type what you want ("trim 0:10 to 1:45, add text overlay at the start, export as mp4"), and it handles the rest. No timeline, no software to install beyond OpenClaw itself.

I've been using it for family clips too. The subtitle generation is solid if you ever want to caption the videos. Free to try — just search nemo-video on clawhub.ai.