How Claude Saved Me From Days of Work Editing a Video of a Snowdon Ascent

Earlier this year, my friend Adam asked me to help him film some content for his YouTube channel. He had been gifted a DNSYS Z1 Exoskeleton (robotic legs) after pitching them the idea of walking up Yr Wyddfa / Snowdon in North Wales via Crib Goch, the most dangerous route, while using the assistive technology. He needed someone with a drone, a gimbal and the same attitude as him towards hauling large amounts of equipment up big hills, so we got a date in the diary and planned the trip.

We drove up on the Sunday, camped near the top of the mountain that evening, summited on the Monday morning, then walked back down and drove home that afternoon. Pretty pleased with myself, I started moving the footage from the many cameras we'd used over to my computer, and that's when I found the first big issue. I hadn't thought to set the date and time properly on our cameras, so my DJI Osmo was recording in the 1970s, my A6400 was out by a day, the GoPro was out by a year, and the footage I copied from my phone to Dropbox had a creation date of when it was uploaded rather than when it was filmed. The drone and Adam's camera had the right time, but they had the least footage between them.

While not the end of the world, it was going to make editing a coherent story an absolute nightmare if none of the footage was dated correctly. We needed to rename every single video file so we could sort by date and easily find what we shot on the Sunday and what we shot on the Monday morning. Doing that by hand for the roughly 400 clips we'd shot across the two days would easily have taken a day.

Surely, I thought, there had to be an easier way to rename files across six folders into a consistent, reliable naming structure we could edit from. Enter my friend and yours: Claude.

For the three cameras with the wrong internal clock, we needed to find the time each recording was stamped with, shift it by the right offset, and rename the file to YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS-CAMERA_NAME-FILE_ID.mp4. The iPhone footage needed the same naming structure, but because it had all been uploaded to Dropbox in one go, that logic wouldn't work. Instead, we pulled the recording time from each file's metadata and used that for the file name. For the two cameras with the correct date, it was a simple mapping from the recording time to the new file name.

Now sure, I could have written a Python script to do this, and that would have cut the time from a day to closer to four hours. But with Claude, it was done in only slightly more time than it took me to work out how far to shift the times.

You can see the full video we made here, or watch the highlights video I've pulled together below.

I'm always interested in hearing about the genuinely interesting, novel and useful things people have used AI for. If you want to chat about AI and how it's saved you hours or days, feel free to get in touch at alex@gluestudio.co.uk.