CutClaw: Agentic Hours-Long Video Editing via Music Synchronization
Organizations: Beijing Jiaotong University · GVC Lab, Great Bay University · ARC Lab, Tencent
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.
Figures & tables
| Method | Visual Quality | Instruction Follow | Audio-Visual Harmony | Human-Like | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nar | Obj | Film | Vlog | Avg | Nar | Obj | Film | Vlog | Avg | Nar | Obj | Film | Vlog | Avg | Nar | Obj | Film | Vlog | Avg | |
| NarratoAI* | 11.6% | 11.2% | 27.3% | - | 11.4% | 14.8% | 10.8% | 28.7% | - | 12.8% | 11.2% | 12.4% | 25.3% | - | 11.8% | 12.0% | 8.4% | 23.3% | - | 10.2% |
| UVCOM | 18.0% | 16.8% | 7.3% | 23.6% | 17.4% | 18.8% | 13.2% | 7.3% | 22.0% | 16.0% | 17.2% | 13.2% | 6.0% | 22.8% | 15.2% | 18.8% | 15.6% | 9.3% | 23.6% | 17.2% |
| Time-R1 | 25.2% | 17.6% | 18.0% | 22.4% | 21.4% | 22.4% | 19.6% | 16.7% | 24.0% | 21.0% | 23.2% | 16.8% | 17.3% | 18.4% | 20.0% | 24.8% | 22.8% | 16.7% | 25.6% | 23.8% |
| CutClaw | 45.2% | 54.4% | 47.3% | 54.0% | 49.8% | 44.0% | 56.4% | 47.3% | 53.6% | 50.2% | 48.4% | 57.6% | 51.3% | 57.6% | 53.0% | 44.4% | 53.2% | 50.7% | 50.4% | 48.8% |