Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

Source: Hacker News

Overview

We’re Saksham and Ishan, the founders of Cardboard (https://www.usecardboard.com). Cardboard lets you turn raw footage into an edited video simply by describing what you want in natural language.

• Try the demo (no login required): https://demo.usecardboard.com
• Demo video: https://www.usecardboard.com/share/fUN2i9ft8B46

The Problem

Creators often have mountains of raw assets—product walkthroughs, customer interviews, travel videos, screen recordings, changelogs, etc.—that sit idle in cloud storage or on hard drives. Producing a first cut typically requires:

1. Manually scrubbing through footage
2. Arranging clips in the correct sequence
3. Syncing music, exporting, and uploading
4. Sharing for feedback via WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, etc.
5. Re‑iterating until everyone is satisfied

Both of us have experienced this friction:

• Saksham creates social‑media content (~250 K views/month) and found editing to be the bottleneck.
• Ishan produced launch videos for HackerRank’s all‑hands demo days, spending most of his time on cuts and sequencing rather than storytelling.

While tools like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve are powerful, they have steep learning curves and involve a lot of manual labor.

Our Solution: Cardboard

Cardboard lets you issue simple natural‑language commands such as:

• “Make a 60 s recap from this raw footage”
• “Cut this into a 20 s ad”
• “Beat‑sync this to the music I just added”

The system then proposes a first draft on the timeline, which you can refine further.

Technical Highlights

• Client‑side rendering: A custom hardware‑accelerated renderer built on WebCodecs / WebGL2 runs entirely in the browser—no server‑side rendering or plugins required.
• Video understanding pipeline: Cloud VLMs + traditional ML models, orchestrated by third‑party foundational models.
• Feature set:
  • Multi‑track timelines with keyframe animations
  • Shot detection
  • Beat sync via percussion detection
  • Voice‑over generation & voice cloning
  • Background removal
  • Multilingual, spatially aware captions
  • Export to Premiere Pro / DaVinci / Final Cut Pro XML

We’ve shipped 13 releases since November (https://www.usecardboard.com/changelog).

Roadmap

• Real‑time collaboration (a “video git” to eliminate inefficient feedback loops)
• Prediction engine that learns your editing patterns and suggests low‑entropy actions, similar to Cursor’s tab completion but for timeline edits

We believe video creation tools today are stuck in a “local‑first, zero‑collaboration” state—much like developer tools in the early 2000s.

Demo Videos

Here are some videos created with Cardboard:

• https://www.usecardboard.com/share/YYsstWeWE9KI
• https://www.usecardboard.com/share/nyT9oj93sm1e
• https://www.usecardboard.com/share/xK9mP2vR7nQ4

We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. We’ll be in the comments all day.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170174 (Points: 15) (Comments: 3)