I have been making YouTube videos for a decade, at least one a week, and the editing has always been the bottleneck. Not the ideas. Not the shoot. The hours in the timeline afterward.
That changed this year. The video embedded above was edited almost entirely by AI, working directly inside DaVinci Resolve, from a folder of unlabeled files I dumped onto my computer. I want to walk through the whole workflow, because it is genuinely usable at a church right now, and because the parts that matter are not the parts you would expect.
What you need
Three things.
A paid Claude account. I use the Pro plan. You almost certainly need a paid account for this, but you do not need the expensive Max plan.
DaVinci Resolve Studio, the paid version. It is a one-time fee of around $295, or a monthly subscription if you want to try it first. Resolve has a genuinely powerful free version that handles most basic editing needs at a church. Once you see what the AI version does, though, you will not want to go back.
Optionally, Dropbox. This one is worth it if you work with a team, which most church media people do. The Claude connector for Dropbox handles file management, labeling and organizing well enough that it becomes part of the workflow rather than a step beside it.
The setup takes about a minute
Open DaVinci Resolve, go to File, then Setup, then AI assistance. That is where you connect your Claude account. Resolve uses a Claude extension that lets it control another application on your computer, and in this case the application it controls is Resolve itself.
That is the entire setup. You do not need to learn DaVinci Resolve to use this. Knowing the tool helps, because you can describe what you want more precisely, but you can speak in plain, ordinary English. Describe the edit you want and it starts building it.
The part most people will get wrong
You still have to shoot well. Good lighting, good framing, good audio. The AI cannot magically make poor footage look better or bad audio sound better. Everything downstream of the camera is now cheap. Everything at the camera still costs the same attention it always did.
For this video I recorded picture to a memory card in a Sony FX3 and audio to a track in Ableton Live on a laptop across the room. That is more gear than most churches need. You can get genuinely good results with an iPhone on a tripod, one of the small wireless microphones that sends audio straight into the phone, and a single soft key light, or a window if the light is good.
Handing off the edit
Once the content is captured, I put the files into a folder on my computer. I do not label anything. I do not organize anything. That is part of what gets handed off.
Then I go back to Claude, and Resolve does not even need to be open. I describe the video I want: what it is about, where the media lives, and to create the project, pull the media in, label the files and organize it sensibly. I point out which files are screen recordings so they can be used as supporting footage when I talk about a particular thing. I give it a target length, five to eight minutes for something like this, and I say that going longer is fine as long as the content earns it and I am not repeating myself. I ask it to cut false starts and the places where I lose my train of thought. I mention that the footage is 4K, so it can punch in at points to keep the edit from feeling static.
Then it goes to work.
Iterating is the real skill
The first time you do this it takes a while, and you will go back and forth. Claude builds an edit, tells you it is done, and you watch it and think that is not quite right.
Here is the part worth stealing. While you are reviewing, press M on your keyboard to drop a marker on the timeline, and type a comment on it. “Fix this here.” “I don’t like this.” Then prompt Claude to look at the markers on the timeline and make those revisions. It reads your timeline, knows exactly which moment each note refers to from where the marker sits, and makes the changes.
That single loop is what turns this from a novelty into a workflow. You are not describing a problem in the abstract. You are pointing at it.
It gets better the more you use it
Once you have edited a video you like, ask Claude to make a skill file for it. That captures how you want this type of video cut, so the next one starts from your standard instead of from scratch.
From there it handles background music, motion graphics, your logo, and your brand identity guidelines for colors and fonts. You load those in once and it applies them correctly on every project after that.
And the technology is the worst it will ever be right now. It keeps improving.
What this actually frees up
There are a lot of ways a church could use this. If you are a smaller staff church without a full creative team, this closes a gap you have probably felt for years. If you already have a creative team, your output should multiply.
It still needs your creative taste on the input side. Something has to know how a video ought to flow, and that is still you.
But while the edit is being built, I can be with my family. I can be with my team. I can be with clients. Running an organization like Churchfront and creating content at the same time has always been hard, and I know a lot of you are running churches and ministries and feeling exactly that. This removes an enormous amount of that friction.
The bottleneck was never the ideas. It was the hours between having one and putting it out.
Watch the full walkthrough above, and if you have questions about setting this up for your church, leave them in the comments. If your church is planning an AVL project and you want help thinking it through, you can start a conversation with our team here.