I just did something that feels so magical and futuristic, because it saved me so much time!

Recently, I’ve been using Borumi to edit my videos. Not an ad, I just really love it and it’s super easy to use.

For one of my newsletter sponsors, I said I’d do some extra video ad reads. They wanted them in both vertical and horizontal format, and they also wanted captions for each of them, and a “short version” for each of them, so I ended up having 16 total videos of combinations of horizontal videos with and without captions, and vertical videos with and without captions, and long and short versions of each. Borumi makes that pretty easy, you can toggle on/off captions and toggle layouts quickly, so really I just recorded two videos and hit the toggles to generate them all.

After delivering said videos, the sponsor asked if I could put my name in the corner of each of them. And because I cleaned out my computer… that meant I couldn’t just magically Borumi it away, I had to edit each individual one.

But, I had a pattern I could work with, since they were all generally the same format. I realized I could use FFmpeg instead of a GUI-based video editor to script this out!

So, I made 4 overlay images: two horizontal and two vertical, with my name in the upper left and bottom left (because videos with captions would need my name in the upper left).

Then, realizing I didn’t have to manually write this script, I popped over to GitHub Copilot and put this prompt in (using Copilot Fusion for the model):

Inside of this folder I have videos with filenames that end with -horizontal, -horizontal-captions, -vertical, and -vertical-captions. I also have four images, each starting with overlay, and each of them have similar suffixes. Use FFmpeg to add these overlays to each of the videos (where *-horizontal.mp4 should have the overlay overlay-horizontal.png, and so on, relatively speaking), and put them in the with-overlays/ folder in here.

Five minutes later, I had 16 videos edited and delivered to the sponsor!

All 32 videos came from just two recordings thanks to these tools. That’s MAGICAL.