I've been making videos (episodes) for my YouTube channel. They are all in a standard format with an intro which has the episode # and title, then the clips fade in always using the same simple cross-fade. I'm putting it all together using After Effects CS6. It seems to be too time consuming to manually trim/align the clips and then apply the transitions.
The first thing I do is watch my source content and note the in/out times for all of the clips (could be one or more in/out per clip). Then I mark certain things like "speed up 4x" or "no audio", etc. I wonder if there's a way I can write a script and then have the video be produced for me, quickly. I'd need to supply some values for some variables, such as episode # and name, and then the in/out/etc. for each clip.
What tools exist that would allow me to create the final video from a "script"?
PS: I'm a software engineer so I'm sure I could just write a program to do this for me, but I'm sure it already exists!