CutClaw: Agentic Hours-Long Video Editing via Music Synchronization

TL;DR

CutClaw is an autonomous multi-agent system that efficiently creates short, rhythm-aligned videos from hours-long footage by leveraging multimodal models and hierarchical decomposition.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-agent framework with hierarchical multimodal decomposition for automated, narrative-consistent video editing synchronized with music.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in video quality and rhythm alignment.

Effectively captures both fine-grained details and global structures in videos.

Demonstrates the potential for autonomous, long-form video editing.

Abstract

Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.