stage-decide

name

stage-decide

description

The decision layer for real footage — understand → select → produce an EVIDENCE-bearing rough cut. Trigger when the EDIT task is "find / select / reduce / clean" (remove dead air, drop fillers, pick highlights, cut 1 hour to 3 minutes), NOT executing a known timecode edit (that is stage-edit). Deterministic auto-cuts (silence/filler/quality) are reliable; narrative/emotional selection is a low-confidence DRAFT for the user to review.

stage-decide

The hard, valuable part of editing real footage is not executing a cut you already chose — it is figuring out WHAT to cut: understanding opaque raw material, removing its intrinsic defects (dead air, fillers, weak takes), and reducing it without losing the point. This skill is the "understand → decide" layer; stage-edit executes the cuts you land on.

Describe what to produce; the operations run through the CLI (or the equivalent MCP tool): ovs edit trim-silence / ovs edit remove-fillers (deterministic auto-cuts that return evidence), ovs scenes (cut candidates), ovs quality (blur/exposure/black/freeze flags), ovs transcribe --out (word timings saved as JSON), ovs silence.

Use this when

The user supplies real footage AND the work is to select or clean, not to run a known edit: "cut this 40-min recording to a 2-min highlight", "remove the ums and dead air", "make 3 clips from this podcast", "tighten this talking-head". If they already gave you timecodes ("trim 0:10–0:35"), skip this — that is plain stage-edit.

Method

1. Understand the material first (never decide against footage you have not measured):
   • ovs edit probe for duration/resolution.
   • Spoken footage → ovs transcribe raw/clip.mp4 --out project/transcripts/clip.json (word-level timings) so you cut on sentence/word boundaries, never mid-word.