PySceneDetect★★★★★
Finds every camera cut in your video automatically. Powers smart cropping + transitions.
why it matters
PySceneDetect scans any video and spits out the timestamp of every hard cut — the moment the camera switches. For multi-cam podcasts, that's the boundary you need so your 9:16 crop follows the active speaker without drifting on stale frames.
Used in podcast-clipper crop pipelines alongside face tracking — same library Loya's LYRC export pipeline relies on for scene work. Free, Python, actively maintained (commits this week).
install
pip install scenedetect[opencv]where to find it
no commits in 71 days. this doesn't mean it's broken — some small repos are "finished" — but if you hit an install issue, it may not get patched quickly.
You only work with single-camera talking-head footage — scene detection isn't useful there.