How to Edit AI-Generated Video: The Complete Workflow

Sora, Veo, Runway and Kling all hand you the same thing: a stack of short clips, usually five to ten seconds each, that don't match each other and aren't ready to post. Generating the footage was the fun part. To edit AI-generated video you still need the boring old post work: line the clips up, fix the color, sort out the sound, put captions on it, and get stills for the thumbnail. This is the workflow we use in ClipCraft's VideoCraft editor, which is free and runs entirely in a browser tab.

Why every AI clip needs the same fixes

AI video has a specific set of problems that normal footage doesn't. Two generations from the same prompt come back with different color temperatures, so cuts between them feel off even when the content matches. Clips are short, which means an AI edit has far more cuts per minute than a filmed one. And the audio situation is messy: some generators output silence, some output placeholder sound you'll want to replace anyway. None of this is hard to fix. It's just the same five fixes, every single time, which is exactly why a focused editor beats a general-purpose one here.

How to edit AI-generated video, step by step

1. Get your clips on a timeline

Create a free account and open VideoCraft. You can drag files from your desktop straight onto the timeline: they import into the Media bin and land as clips right where you dropped them, and a multi-file drop lays them down back-to-back in order. Each video arrives as a linked pair, the picture on a video track and its audio on an audio track underneath, and the pair moves, trims and splits together until you unlink it.

Trimming is where AI edits live, so learn two keys: S splits the selected clip at the playhead, and C switches to the razor so every click is a cut. Magnet snap is on by default and pulls clip edges together, which is what you want when you're butting ten short generations against each other. The sequence defaults to 16:9 at 1920×1080; Settings has presets for 9:16 vertical, 1:1, 4:5 and more, each with real resolution tiers up to 4K, and the Position and Scale defaults follow whatever you pick.

2. Fix the look

This is the step people skip, and it's why so many AI montages feel like a slideshow of unrelated stock footage. Open the Effects panel and drag a tile onto a clip (or double-click with the clip selected). The Color Correction group has Brightness & Contrast, Saturation, Hue Shift, and Warm and Cool temperature shifts; a shared Warm pass across every clip does a lot to make mismatched generations read as one scene. Each applied effect shows up in Clip Settings as its own section with sliders, and every parameter can be keyframed.

In the shot above I pushed Warm's temperature from its default 25 up to 45 and let Vintage's defaults (20 fade, -10 contrast, 80 saturation) do the rest; the raw clip is the saturated blue one in the Media bin. These aren't CSS filters, by the way. The whole effect stack renders through a WebGL pipeline on the GPU, which is also what makes the keyers real: Ultra Key gives you an eyedropper, matte views and spill suppression, so you can generate a subject on a flat green background, key it out, and composite it on a track above different footage. Tracks stack V1 to V16, and keyed transparency shows the layers below.

3. Smooth the cuts (mostly, don't)

Unpopular opinion: most cuts don't need a transition. A hard cut on motion almost always reads better than a dissolve, and AI footage already has a dreamy quality that too many cross fades turn to mush. Where transitions do earn their place is music-driven montages and scene changes, and VideoCraft ships 16 of them in three groups: dissolves and fades, wipes and slides, and distort effects like Whip Pan and Zoom Punch. Drag one onto the cut between two clips and it appears as a small fuchsia block on the clip edge; the duration slider in Clip Settings runs from 0.2 seconds up to half the clip.

One honest note: the outgoing side of a transition currently holds a freeze of that clip's last frame rather than continuing to play. At a half-second dissolve you will never notice. Stretch one to two seconds over fast motion and you will, so keep them short.

4. Sort out the sound

Right-click a clip and choose Unlink audio & video when you want to throw a generator's audio away and keep the picture. Music beds drop onto any audio track the same way the videos did, and hovering a clip's top corners reveals fade handles you can drag inward for fade-ins and fade-outs.

For anything deeper, right-click an audio clip and pick Edit in SoundCraft. That opens SoundCraft, our full browser DAW, in a new tab with your clip loaded; EQ it, stack effects, add a music layer, then hit Send back to VideoCraft and the edited mix swaps into the originating clip in place. Your video timeline never moves while this happens, and the original audio stays in the Media bin as a manual undo.

5. Captions for social

If the destination is TikTok, Reels or Shorts, captions aren't optional. The Video Captions toolhandles this as its own step: drop in a clip, pick from 82 animated styles where the spoken word lights up as it plays, and export with the captions burned in. The AI auto-caption button transcribes with word-level timestamps for 5 tokens per started minute (a free account's monthly 100 tokens cover a fair amount of short-form work), or you can paste a transcript and tap-to-sync the lines by hand for free. We wrote up the full process in the TikTok captions guide.

6. Stills and thumbnails

The camera button in the Player's transport bar grabs the current frame as a real composited still at the sequence resolution, so a 1920×1080 project gives you a 1920×1080 image with every layer, effect and keyed element rendered in. Pick PNG, JPEG or WebP, name it, and either download it for a thumbnail or tick "Import into this project" to reuse the frame as a still clip on the timeline. Freeze-frame endings for vertical clips take about ten seconds this way.

The honest part: exporting

Here's the current limitation, stated plainly: VideoCraft cannot yet render the full multi-track timeline out to an MP4, and video projects don't save to the cloud yet either. Both are on the roadmap (timeline export needs server-side rendering, which is being built). So treat a VideoCraft session as one sitting for now.

What ships out of the workflow today:

• Finished captioned clips, exported from the Video Captions tool with everything burned in. For short-form posting this covers the main use case.
• Full-resolution stills from the screenshot tool, with effects and keys applied.
• Finished audio mixes as WAV or MP3 through the SoundCraft round-trip.

Everything in this post is on the free plan, and the editors stay free on every tier; the paid plans sell storage and AI compute tokens, not editing features. For a fuller tour of the editor itself (keyframes, the motion gizmo, floating panels), read our free online video editor guide.

The generators will keep getting better, and the output will still land in your lap as a pile of short, mismatched, half-silent clips. Having one place to assemble, grade, key and caption them, without installing anything, is the point. Load your last batch of generations and run the six steps on it.