video-highlight-select

name	video-highlight-select
description	Help a human choose article-relevant highlight moments from a local video-material-ingest package. Use this whenever the user wants to find/select/review video highlights, create a contact sheet, choose clips for an article, or prepare start/end/title/caption candidates before running article-video-clip.

Video Highlight Select

Use this skill when a video has already been ingested or wrapped as a local video-material-ingest package and the user wants help choosing useful moments for an article.

This is a human-assisted selection skill. It does not auto-detect the best highlight, render final clips, generate subtitles, download URLs, or upload to WeChat.

Prerequisites

• A local material package with media.ext, manifest.json, and sources.md.
• ffprobe and ffmpeg available on PATH.
• An article intent, section purpose, or rough editorial goal if available.

Bare .mp4 files in content/inbox/ should be wrapped into a material package first. Use a media.mp4 symlink to avoid copying large local files.

Default Workflow

1. Confirm the material package path.
2. Ask for the article intent if it is not obvious:
   • opening hook
   • visual proof
   • cultural/context detail
   • transition/atmosphere
   • quote or argument support
3. Run a dry-run first.
4. Generate a contact sheet and candidate workspace.
5. Let the human review the contact sheet and choose or edit candidate rows.
6. Pass the confirmed candidate to article-video-clip.

Default Command

node scripts/select-video-highlights.mjs \
  --material /absolute/path/to/article/assets/media/source-slug \
  --intent "放在文章开头抓人，展示这段舞为什么有传播性"

With an already-known candidate:

node scripts/select-video-highlights.mjs \
  --material /absolute/path/to/article/assets/media/source-slug \
  --intent "放在文章开头抓人" \
  --candidate "00:03-00:11|邯郸学步：曲裾入场|素材再包装|wechat-landscape|开头视觉钩子"

Use --dry-run when checking paths and planned commands:

node scripts/select-video-highlights.mjs \
  --material /absolute/path/to/article/assets/media/source-slug \
  --intent "文章段落意图" \
  --dry-run

Output

The default output lives inside the material package:

<material-package>/highlight-select/
├── contact-sheet.jpg
├── highlight-candidates.md
└── highlight-candidates.json

highlight-candidates.md is the human review surface. It records source metadata, media metadata, the article intent, a contact sheet, a candidate table, and an article-video-clip handoff command.

Compatibility Rule

Do not rely on FFmpeg drawtext for contact-sheet timestamps. Homebrew's regular ffmpeg formula may not include the optional font-rendering filters needed for drawtext, even when FFmpeg itself is current.

Use a plain contact-sheet.jpg plus the generated contact-sheet index table in highlight-candidates.md / highlight-candidates.json. If richer labels are needed later, add a Pillow/ImageMagick post-processing step instead of requiring ffmpeg-full.

Candidate Format

Use this format for each manual candidate:

start-end|title|caption|preset|notes

Example:

00:03-00:11|邯郸学步：曲裾入场|素材再包装|wechat-landscape|开头抓人

Supported presets should match article-video-clip, currently:

• wechat-landscape
• wechat-portrait

Handoff

After the human chooses a row, run article-video-clip with the selected candidate:

node ../article-video-clip/scripts/create-article-video-clip.mjs \
  --material /absolute/path/to/article/assets/media/source-slug \
  --start 00:03 \
  --end 00:11 \
  --preset wechat-landscape \
  --title "邯郸学步：曲裾入场" \
  --caption "素材再包装"

Boundaries

• video-material-ingest downloads/wraps known video URLs and records provenance.
• video-highlight-select helps humans choose candidate moments.
• article-video-clip renders the confirmed clip.
• wechat-publish-workflow handles whether/how the final video enters a WeChat draft.

Do not claim the highlight has been automatically selected. The human still decides which candidate is editorially right for the article.