Cutpilot | Devpost

Inspiration 💡

As a team of students with backgrounds in video editing, we all knew the same pain: hours spent stitching raw footage into something watchable. It felt tedious, repetitive, and let’s be honest, soul-crushing at times. With the rise of influencers (especially tech-influencers here at the University of Waterloo), the demand for rapid, high-quality content has skyrocketed. Thus, we asked ourselves:

"Shouldn't there be an easier way to do this?"

That question sparked the beginning of our project: the fully automated video editing tool, Cutpilot.

What We Built 🛠️

Frontend: Built with TypeScript, React, and Tailwind CSS, powered by the blood, sweat, and tears of Joanna and Tiara.
Backend: Crafted using FastAPI, Python, Cohere, and FFmpeg, supported by Nigel and Eric’s last remaining nerves.

The frontend delivers a clean, responsive experience, while the backend does the heavy lifting; analyzing video frames, trimming, and stitching content together with AI assistance.

Challenges We Faced 🏋️‍♂️

We didn’t just face some challenges, we faced all of them:

Learning unfamiliar technologies on the fly
Balancing time and space complexity while analyzing thousands of frames
Wrestling with conflicting design opinions (turns out we’re all stubborn, but pretty darn creative)
And, according to Eric, enduring a critical shortage of Red Bull

This wasn’t just a technical journey, it was a test of patience, resilience, and teamwork.

What We Learned 🤔💭

How to integrate AI-powered video analysis into a working pipeline
Why efficiency matters when processing large media files
That sometimes the hardest problem isn’t code, it’s aligning visions within a team
And perhaps most importantly: video editing doesn’t have to be a painful, drawn-out process

What's Next for CutPilot? 🆙

CutPilot is just the beginning. Moving forward, we want to:

Add smarter editing features, like auto-highlighting the most exciting clips
Experiment with AI-driven style templates so creators can match their favorite aesthetic in one click
Improve collaboration tools, letting multiple editors and creators work on the same project seamlessly
Optimize further for speed and scalability, so even long-form content can be processed in minutes, not hours

Our world is shifting, content is being created and consumed faster than ever before. By automating video editing, we’re not just saving time, we’re enabling creators to focus on what actually matters: their ideas, their voice, and their stories.