Text based editing after your first cut.
Timeline based editing.
Record multi-take videos in-app.
Coming soon: batched editing

Inspiration

Creating talking-head videos helped my first app, Skylight Social, grow from 0 to over 400,000 downloads with zero paid ads. Organic talking-head content was incredibly effective for me. But I found myself editing into the early morning hours to crank out content every day. It was unsustainable.

The AI video editors that existed tried to do too much. I didn't need flashy animations or overlays or crazy looking captions. I just needed a tool that took my raw footage and handed me back a cut with no bad takes, no filler words, and no silences, preferably all on my iPhone. Bonus points if it cleaned up my audio while it was at it.

I wanted it so badly, I built it. Every feature in Refined was built by a creator, for creators, so we can get back to what we do best: making good content.

What it does

You do the talking. Refined does the first cut.

Record a video in the app or import them from your camera roll. Refined listens to your video, edits the transcript the way a human editor would, and finds the best version of what you were trying to say. Filler words come out, repeated takes get reduced to the best one, and dead air gets trimmed to a natural pace you can adjust with one slider.

You can easily fine-tune the cut with the transcript editor or the timeline editor. Highlight a sentence to cut it, highlight it again to bring it back. Studio-grade audio cleanup is a checkbox, and export goes straight to your camera roll.

It's a subscription with a monthly processing-time balance, so you always know how much editing you have left.

Download Refined on the App Store

How we built it

Refined is an Expo app with a custom native module at its core. All the best parts of JavaScript mixed with all the best parts of Native. The app shell, transcript editor, onboarding, and billing are React Native and TypeScript. The frame-accurate scrubbing, the smooth timeline, the camera, and the player that plays your cut list as one continuous video, are native Swift on AVFoundation (Android in the works). Expo's module system allows me to add in Native performance where it matters and JavaScript speed with OTAs everywhere else.

The editing itself is a two-pass pipeline: word-level transcription with every um and false start preserved, then an AI editor that works at the take level instead of word by word, which is what makes the cuts feel like a person made them. A final pass evens out the pacing.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the timeline to scrub smoothly on a phone took about ten attempts. Most approaches stuttered or fought the scroll momentum, and the one that finally worked was the one that stopped trying to seek the video while you drag.

Most voice enhancement APIs were super expensive and made the profit margins of the app unsustainable, but I knew, as a creator, how important clean audio was. So I ended up building my own infrastructure for this. I was an audio engineer in a past life, so adding a denoiser and LUFS leveling wasn't too hard. The result? Studio-quality sound on a backend I run myself, for about a cent an hour.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Before Refined ever hit the App Store, I got a group of around 30 creators testing it and giving feedback. Their notes shaped what shipped.

What's next for Refined | AI Video Editor

Captions, multi-clip stitching, and Android. iOS is live today; the Android side of the native module exists but hasn't shipped, and it's the next milestone.

The goal hasn't changed. We want to help creators get their evenings back. They make the content, Refined makes the edit.

Follow the build: @buildwithtori on TikTok