video-studio

name	video-studio
description	Edit any video by conversation — the orchestrator for the bundled video pipeline. Use when the user wants to edit, cut, caption, grade, or add motion graphics to footage; drops a folder of clips and says "edit this"; or asks to make a promo/teaser/tutorial/short. Routes to video-use (the cut engine) and HyperFrames (motion-graphics overlays), with a motion-craft library for taste.

video-studio

One conversational pipeline for editing any video. Three layers compose; this skill routes between them. The LLM never watches the video — it reads it (transcript + on-demand timeline PNGs) and edits with word-boundary precision.

The three layers (what's bundled here)

1. The cut engine — video-use (skills/video-use/) Transcribe → pack → reason → EDL → render → self-eval. Owns: filler-word removal, dead-space trimming, color grade, 30ms audio fades, subtitle burn, and the render.py composite that lays overlays onto the cut. This is the spine of every edit. Read skills/video-use/SKILL.md for the 12 production rules.

2. The motion layer — HyperFrames (skills/hyperframes/, hyperframes-cli/, hyperframes-registry/, gsap/, website-to-hyperframes/) HTML + GSAP compositions rendered through headless Chrome to .mov with alpha. Use for: lower-third captions, title cards, callouts, audio-reactive bits, scene transitions, kinetic text. video-use spawns these as overlays and composites them.

3. The craft layer — make-a-video, short-form-video, docs/MOTION_PHILOSOPHY.md Storyboard, brand system, pacing, motion taste. Reach here for how it should feel, not how to render.

The standard loop

1. Inventory. List the sources in the folder. Don't transcribe unprompted — wait for the user to point at footage and say what they want.
2. Transcribe + pack (video-use): one transcript call per source → one takes_packed.md.
3. Strategy → confirm. Propose the cut (beats, order, what gets cut). Wait for OK. Never touch the cut without approval.
4. EDL. Write the cut list (ranges = source seconds, overlays = caption .movs in output seconds). See templates/project/ for the shape.
5. Motion (HyperFrames, when a beat needs it): author one composition, render per variant --format mov (alpha — webm comes out opaque).
6. Composite (video-use): render.py <edl> -o final.mp4 --no-subtitles --no-loudnorm (drop --no-loudnorm only if the source has real audio).
7. Self-eval → persist. The engine checks every cut boundary before you show anything. Session memory lives in the project's project.md.

Hard rules (non-negotiable; taste is free)

• Captions render --format mov (ProRes 4444 yuva). webm = opaque, no alpha.
• Silent source needs a stereo silent track before render.py (its audio path expects one) and --no-loudnorm.
• Speed-ramps are pre-rendered setpts clips, referenced as their own EDL sources. No native EDL speed.
• Outputs live in <videos>/edit/ — keep the skill dirs clean.

Setup

Run ./install.sh once (checks ffmpeg/node/chrome, sets up video-use's venv, wires the skills, prompts for the ElevenLabs key). Then cd into a folder of footage and start a session. See the repo README.md.