Animate the title as a COLD OPEN in the TOP banner over the live opening footage — no blocking center card — held until TITLE_SWAP (default 2.0s) so brand-overlays can hand off to the source citation in the same slot. Frame 1 stays content (a face mid-sentence) to protect the swipe-rate / "Stayed to Watch" signal. ONE animation for every short — the glitch style (RGB-split banner + scanline tear, style-matched zap/crackle SFX) — a PIL frame sequence anchored at TITLE_ANCHOR_FRAC (default 0.135).
Generate a per-clip third-person engagement-driven title card text. Claude reads the clip's transcript, the source ingest.json metadata, and (optionally) pick-segments' per-span judgment (topic, rationale, suggested title) so it reads the speaker's register — sincere vs ironic vs joking — before titling. Emits a hook-driven ALL-CAPS title (<=7 words).
Per-clip upload-readiness grade (0-99) read off a FINISHED .mp4 plus its persisted sidecar plans — the first skill that inspects a delivered pixel-level artifact, the on-disk proxy for YouTube's VVSA swipe gate. Deterministic retention-proxy floor (frame1_is_face, letterbox_bars, credit_lit_at_open, first_visual_change, first_payoff_offset, longest_static_gap, opening_caption_words, max_residual_silence, terminal_loop_score) with hard caps (letterbox / face_withheld / credit_at_open / blocking_card / dead_tail) that cap grade≤40, plus ONE batched Claude rubric call (hook↔payoff / open-loop / cold-context) skipped when GRADE_SKIP_CLAUDE=1. Runs at the END of the per-span chain (after save-local) AND standalone over the whole output/ backlog (--backlog → output/_triage.json). Emits clip_NN.grade.json per the locked SELECTION-SUITE-CONTRACT schema. Idempotent (.gcmeta), non-fatal (any error → DROSS/empty, exit 0).
Claude picks CONTEXTUAL/scene-level anchors from a clip transcript (literal objects, establishing shots, evocative concept footage matched to the story's tone — not just keyword nouns) and sources full-bleed B-roll cutaways via keyless yt-dlp YouTube search + mcptube frame-sampling + Claude vision verify. The verify step gets the spoken context and rejects literal-but-wrong matches (e.g. a cat laser toy for a tense "red dot" beat). Aims dense (8-12 windows, targeting cutaway footage on ~60%+ of the runtime; emits cutaway_coverage in the plan and WARNs below BROLL_MIN_COVER, default 0.6). Emits broll_plan.json with per-cutaway placement [t0,t1] and source metadata; clip files are namespaced per-clip. Windows snap to whole chunk-captions boundaries; vision calls capped by BROLL_VISION_CAP (default 16).
Pick N clip-worthy spans from a transcript. Claude reads the full transcript plus a per-second RMS energy summary and returns the most engaging time ranges for shorts. The atomic unit of a short is ONE IDEA, not one topic — each span carries `cuts` (1-3 non-contiguous source ranges assembled into one flowing story) plus `idea` (the one-sentence throughline all cuts share). A multi-cut span may pull cuts from DIFFERENT topics when they develop the same single idea; a single-cut span must stay within one topic and is just `cuts:[[t0,t1]]`. A 1-second SPOKEN hook is mandatory (no title card rescues a slow open — picks under PICK_HOOK_FLOOR are dropped). Replaces the old keyword/hook-word heuristic ranker.
Deterministic source-video discovery — the clip-channel "outlier" method, keyless. Searches seed niche queries via yt-dlp ytsearch, prefilters to long-form candidates, fetches full metadata, and ranks by outlier score (views/day velocity, views-per-subscriber ratio, comment engagement, replay-heatmap peakiness). Emits a ranked candidates.json to pick the next pipeline source from. No Claude call, no API key.
Post-edit verification of a short's opening and closing 1.5s. Claude sees a 3-frame strip from each end plus the trimmed transcript text around each end and returns {action:keep}, {action:trim,t0,t1} (inward-only), or {action:drop,reason}. Checks three things — (1) cleanliness (partial words, breath cutoffs, off-shot frames); (2) opening-hook strength (snap t0 inward to a stronger hook line if the first 3s is pure setup); (3) payoff landing (snap t1 to ~80ms past the payoff word when the tail trails into filler). Runs after tighten-pace, before fit-vertical. Inward-only — bookend-trim's outward pass already had its chance. Drops the span only on cleanliness failures requiring >2s of trim — never on hook-weakness alone.
Sidecar-free style analyzer — reduce ANY finished vertical short (ours in output/ OR a downloaded Group C exemplar) into a versioned Style Profile JSON using ONLY pixels + audio, never our internal edit plans. Deterministic tier (ffmpeg scene-detect for cut rhythm, silencedetect + RMS for speech/SFX/music, MediaPipe face sampling for cutaway fraction, Canny caption-band density) fills every quantitative field; ONE optional Claude vision call on a director-pass contact sheet fills the enumerated judgment fields (broll_mode, caption_style, production_class, hook_device). The shared organ of the style-replication loop — style-corpus profiles Group C exemplars with it and style-gate profiles our span 0 with it, so comparison is fair (delivered pixels vs delivered pixels). Non-fatal, idempotent (.ppmeta). PROFILE_VISION=0 skips the vision call.