Free Guide | Lazyting

Claude Code

Any paid Claude plan. It installs ffmpeg and a renderer when you ask.

One reference

A video a real editor made that looks how you want yours to look.

Your A-roll

The talking-head clip you want edited, from any camera or phone.

Step 01

Feed Claude a real reference

Claude has no taste until you give it one. Pick a video a professional editor made and give Claude the video file itself. Screenshots hide the most important part, which is how things move.

decode this reference: colors, holds, easing, type

Ask it to write what it finds into a file called STYLE.md:

Every brand color, with hex codes
How long each graphic stays on screen
How elements enter and leave, and how fast
The font, weight and letter spacing

Tip: tell it to measure frame by frame with ffmpeg. If it guesses, it guesses "generic YouTube".

Decoding my reference

Step 02

Tell it short form or long form

Same style, different rules. Say it at the start of every project, or Claude builds 16:9 graphics and squeezes them into a vertical frame.

Short form: 1080x1920, fast cuts, big type, graphics on screen about half the time.
Long form: 1920x1080, longer holds, more time on your face.

Short form vs long form

Step 03

Teach it real UI

This is what stops an edit from looking like AI made it. When you mention a tool, show the real tool. In my reel that was Meta Ads Manager, Google Calendar, an Instagram notification on a lock screen and a Premiere timeline.

Use a real iPhone mockup PNG, with your video under the bezel so no white gap shows.
Real names and profile photos in comments and DMs. No black boxes.
Real file names on screen.
No text on screen that you don't say out loud.

Real iOS notifications

Step 04

Direct every motion

Even after steps 1 to 3, the edit still looks like Claude made it, because its default motion is slow and even. You have to say exactly how each thing moves. This is the prompt I typed in the reel:

move the iPhone from A to B, straight up. cubic-bezier(.25,0,.11,1), enter at peak speed, zoom out 1.52x on every cut

My settings, so you can copy them:

Easing cubic-bezier(.25,0,.11,1). In After Effects, 25% out and 88.8% in influence.
Things appear at full speed and only slow down. Visible speeding up looks like a template.
New graphics cut in at 1.52x and zoom out to 1x over 1.2 seconds.
Text comes in word by word, dropping down about 56px while it fades in. Text never zooms.
Every animation holds 6 seconds. Shorter ones kill the pacing.

Directed A to B move

Step 05

Make a design board first

This one saves the most tokens. Before anything animates, have Claude make one still per scene with the line you say and when you say it.

transcribe my A-roll with word timings. then make a design board: one still per scene, with the spoken line and timestamp under each. don't animate anything until I approve it.

Fixing a board takes minutes. Fixing 27 finished animations takes hours and burns through your limit.

My design board

Step 06

Place everything yourself

Claude renders every scene as its own clip: MP4 for full-screen scenes, MOV with a transparent background for pieces over your face. You drop them on your A-roll in Premiere or CapCut.

Don't hand this part to AI. You check that each cut lands on the right word and that the whole thing feels human.

render every approved scene as its own 4K clip. transparent MOV for anything that sits over my face.

Clips on my timeline

Skip the setup

Or get the 10 styles I already trained

Doing all six steps for one style takes a while. I spent 3 months doing it for 10 styles and packaged them as Lazyting. Each one is a Claude Code skill with the colors, type, motion and real UI already set. Drop the folder in and say "edit this in VSL style".