Vanpelt Studio is launching.

For the past months I've been building Vanpelt Studio — a desktop copilot for long-form video, and the studio's first product. It's in private beta now, with a public launch around the corner.

Why long-form is the hard part

Shorts are an editing problem. The 8, 15, 30-minute videos are a structure problem — and structure is exactly where a solo creator has no team to lean on. Every long-form creator knows the wall: hours of dead footage and no way through it.

The Studio carries a video through the whole arc: shaping a rough idea into a story spine, transcribing and organizing the footage locally, assembling the cut on one canvas, and handing a ready-to-cut project to your editor.

Local-first, by design

Your footage never leaves your machine. Transcription runs on-device with Whisper, ffmpeg handles the media, and only derived text — transcripts, the beat sheet, never raw media — is sent to Claude for reasoning. Creators bring their own API key: full cost control, nothing marked up.

Where it stands

The full story is in the case study, and the sizzle reel shows it in motion. The waitlist is open at vanpelt.studio — early sign-ups get launch access and founding pricing, including a one-time founding lifetime license.

I use the Studio to make the channel's own videos, and I make videos for brands with the same pipeline — that loop between building the tool and doing the work is the whole point of this studio.