How a Longtime Print Journalist Branched Out to Video by Editing the Transcript

Edit from transcript lets you edit a video the way you edit a document. Delete a sentence or move one, and Weftly cuts the video to match. There is no timeline and no editing software.

Cutting a talk or an interview usually means scrubbing a timeline to find the spot where someone rambled. You already know which sentences you want. You can see them in the transcript. So edit the transcript, and let Weftly cut the video to match.

In June we promised that editing video from the transcript would be available to everyone. It’s live today as Edit from transcript.

Looking for a promo code? Current codes are on the offers page. Enter one at checkout.

What is it like for a print journalist to edit video this way?

Mike Lagerquist is a longtime, much-loved local journalist in Mankato, Minnesota, and he makes The Woven Record with Becki True. He came to video from print. He knows how to cut a sentence, move a paragraph, and find the lead. What stood between him and video was the editing software, which is a different skill with a steep learning curve.

Edit from transcript removes that barrier. The transcript is a document, and working on a document is what Mike already does. He describes it this way: you get a transcript, then “do your editing like it were a Word document, move things around, cut things out,” and Weftly applies those changes to the video. Of everything he has worked on in Weftly lately, he calls this “a really exciting feature.” He doesn’t need editing software on his computer, and he gets to tell his stories in a new way.

His excitement carries through the rest of the conversation. Of using Weftly, he says, “it has been so exciting. I’m looking forward to doing more things on it, because each time you learn that new process, it opens up possibilities for other things to do.” He calls it “very intuitive” and “very easy once you get into it.”

How it works in the browser

1. Open chat.weftly.ai, attach your video, and ask Weftly to transcribe it so you can edit it.
2. When the transcript is ready, Weftly opens the transcript editor in the chat.
3. Click a word to select it, or click a timestamp to select a whole sentence. Shift-click to extend the selection. Press Delete to strike it out.
4. To move sentences, select them, click Move sentences, then pick Put here.
5. Click Cut this video and pay $1.00. Weftly renders the edit and returns the new video.

No account and no timeline. You can’t type in the editor, so every change you make is one Weftly can cut. The editor shows the number of cuts and the new length as you go.

What you get back

• The edited video, cut and joined at the words you kept.
• An SRT and a word-level transcript, re-timed to the new cut, ready for captions.
• Audio loudness-normalized to -14 LUFS, the level YouTube and podcast apps target.

What you can and can’t change

You can delete words, delete sentences, and move whole sentences. You can’t add or change words, because Weftly cuts real footage and can only use words that were spoken. If an edit breaks that rule, Weftly lists the lines it can’t cut before you pay.

Edit from transcript works on video only for now. Each edit can make up to 300 cuts and produce up to 60 minutes of output.

Already have a transcript?

Any video job with a word-level transcript works as the source: Transcribe, Summarize, or Find Clips. The edit runs against the video Weftly already stored, so there’s no re-upload and no second transcript.

From your AI agent

If you use Claude, Cursor, or another MCP client with the Weftly MCP server, ask your agent for the editable transcript of a job. It comes as a plain text file with one numbered line per sentence:

[0001] Hi everyone, um, welcome to the show.
[0002] Today we're talking about how to ship faster.
[0003] And I think the biggest mistake is treating speed and quality as opposites.

Delete lines, delete words, or move lines, and keep each line’s [NNNN] marker. Then send it back with edit_from_transcript. You can hand the file to your agent with instructions like “cut the intro and lead with line 3,” or edit it yourself in any text editor.

Why pay per edit instead of subscribing?

Editing software usually costs a monthly subscription, or adds a watermark to your video. In the clip above, Mike and Becki explain why Weftly charges a flat fee per job instead. You pay when a video comes up, and there is no pressure to produce more just to justify a subscription.

Try it

Open chat.weftly.ai and drop in a video. It’s $1.00 per edit, with no subscription and no sign-up. Current promo codes are on the offers page.