In Episode 36 (March 22, 2026), Sam showed a highlight reel builder he made for our recruiters. It takes an EntreVista AI interview video and its transcript, has AI pick the best moments, lets the recruiter trim them, and renders a branded clip of under a minute with Remotion. He didn't give a total build time; a render takes five to ten minutes.
When a client reviews candidates, they usually get a CV, experience and education. Sam's idea at 02:28 was to also let them see the person speak for a minute before deciding whom to interview. We'd done this occasionally, but it meant handing raw footage to our video editors, and it took hours or days. It wasn't something we could do all the time, so Sam built a tool recruiters with no editing experience could run themselves.
Sam said at 08:29 that it was mainly built in Codex, and at 09:41 that he thinks he started in Claude Code. Remotion came from Jordan, who describes it as video editing as code.
There was absolutely zero editing skills, but just like, you know, playing around with the colors and how I wanted the graphics to to be presented just in natural language, he was able to take that and and help me build this template.
— Sam Nadler, Episode 36
Recruiters can now make reels on their own. We played one on air: a senior data analyst candidate describing their work from ETL through modeling and visualization. The picture for the client is an email with three candidates, three CVs and three video links. Sam's hope is that it moves more candidates from presentation to client interview. Jordan joked we were "giving away a little too much secret sauce."
Render speed was the hardest problem and is still not fast:
So five to ten minutes versus several hours, if not days, feels like a reasonable compromise.
— Sam Nadler, Episode 36
Sam also said there's probably a more automated way to pick clips; he kept manual trimming so recruiters could show each candidate in the best light. Jordan expects the reels to get much better as Remotion and our prompts improve. For an earlier interview build, see NTRVSTA from Episode 6; for picking a coding agent, Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex. More in AI in recruiting and HR.
In Sam's tool, a recruiter uploads the interview video, adds the candidate's name and title, and pastes the transcript. AI picks nine clips in three categories, the recruiter trims and keeps about three, and Remotion renders a branded video shared via an S3 link.
Yes. Sam started in Claude Code, then built mainly in OpenAI Codex with Remotion as the video engine. He styled the template by describing colors and graphics in plain language, with zero editing skills.
For Sam's under-one-minute reels, about five to ten minutes. He said getting render time down was one of the hardest parts of the build.
Jordan describes it as a JavaScript video library: video editing as code, in React. He also uses it for product trailers and for turning slide decks into narrated videos.
