Cutting film, without the flatbed.
Steenbeck.ai is a video editor you drive by editing words. Upload your footage, get an AI transcript, delete the bits you don't want, and we stitch the final cut for you. No timeline, no scrubbing.
The machine we're named after
The Steenbeck is a flatbed film editing table, developed in Germany and refined into the tool editors came to rely on through the 1960s. Before digital editing, cutting a film meant physically handling it — and the Steenbeck let an editor lay reels of picture and magnetic sound flat across a horizontal bed, then glide forwards and backwards over a small built-in screen to hunt for the exact frame to cut.
For decades it was the heart of the edit suite: the place where 16mm and 35mm features, documentaries and news were shaped frame by frame, by hand. That tactile, back-and-forth search for the perfect cut is exactly the feeling we wanted to bring to the browser — minus the reels, the splicing tape, and the table.
What Steenbeck.ai does
Upload a video or audio file and Steenbeck transcribes it with word-level timestamps. Editing is as simple as editing the text: delete a sentence in the transcript and the matching footage disappears. You preview the result instantly, and when you're happy we render the real cut server-side and hand you a download.
It also finds the tedious stuff for you — long silences, and filler words like “um”, “uh” and “you know” — so a rough recording becomes a tight, watchable cut in minutes instead of an evening at a timeline.
Why I built this
I'm a private tutor. I make maths and computing videos on YouTube to help teenagers through their exams — and to show what my teaching is like, which helps bring students to my small tutoring business.
Recording the videos was the easy part. Editing them was the nightmare: cutting out every “um” and every patch of dead air took me hours per video. I don't make any money from the YouTube content, so I needed something that was both fast and genuinely cheap — and every tool I tried was expensive and stuffed with features I was never going to use.
So I built the thing I actually needed: something that edits the video for you automatically, with none of the bloat, for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a week. If you're a small creator, a small business or a solo-preneur in the same boat, this is for you too.
Who it's for
Steenbeck.ai is built for small creators — the people doing it all themselves, who'd rather spend their time making things than wrestling editing software.
If you're a team of one publishing on a schedule, this is for you.