jpreiss/supercutter

tool to construct "supercut" video edits by scraping youtube.

supercutter

Tool to construct "supercut" video edits (e.g. every time Tabasko Sweet says "family") by scraping Youtube.

1. You specify a channel, playlist, etc., and a list of keywords.
2. supercutter splices together every time a keyword appears in your videos.
3. The output is an .EDL file that can be imported in your preferred video editor for fine-tuning.

Rather than analyzing audio, supercutter downloads subtitle files from Youtube. When videos do not have manually written subtitles, Youtube auto-generates them with speech-to-text algorithms. These subtitles usually do a good job recognizing words, but they are not precisely localized in time. However, this is not a big deal, because you will want to manually fine-tune the results anyway for perfect humorous timing.

supercutter generates an .EDL file: a simple, old, text format that should be importable by almost any video editor.

supercutter depends heavily on youtube-dl to parse Youtube's web pages and extract the video and subtitle files. Thanks to the youtube-dl developers for their awesome work!

supercutter requires at least Python 3.6.

Installing dependencies

• Install youtube-dl.
• Install ffmpeg to get the ffprobe utility used to read frames-per-second values from video files.
• Install webvtt-py for parsing subtitle files.

Running the script

usage: supercutter.py [-h] [--output OUTPUT] [--number NUMBER]
                      url keywords [keywords ...]

positional arguments:
  url              url of a youtube channel, playlist, single video, etc.
  keywords         keywords to include in the supercut

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --output OUTPUT  directory to store results in
  --number NUMBER  limit the number of videos scraped

Loading the EDL output in Adobe Premiere

note: these steps are only tested in Premiere Pro CC 10.4.

• Create a new project.
• File > Import supercut.edl.
• Premiere will ask "What video standard does this EDL use"? supercutter has printed the frames-per-second of the videos you downloaded. Make your choice based on this list.
• Premiere asks you to pick a Sequence Preset. Currently, supercutter limits download resolution to 720p, so choose 720p resolution.
• The loaded .edl will appear as a folder called "supercut" in your project, but all the links to the video files will be broken.
• Double-click on the "supercut" folder. Shift-select all of the missing clips.
• Right-click on one selected clip and choose "Link Media..."
• Make sure the "Relink others automatically" box is checked.
• Click the "Locate" button.
• Find the location of that clip inside the /videos subdirectory of the supercutter output directory.
• All the other clips should be found automatically.
• You should now be able to drop the Supercut sequence into the timeline and see your results.
• Since supercutter only makes edits based on the subtitle file (instead of actually analyzing the audio), the supercut will need a lot of fine-tuning.
• The Ripple Edit tool is particularly useful.
• If anyone knows how to fix the EDL so the links aren't broken upon import, please open an issue or pull request!