An opinionated pipeline for editing long-form technical talking-head video with Claude Code. Raw camera and screen recordings go in, a finished, graded, graphicked 4K video comes out, and every step is gated on a measurement rather than a judgement call.
It is not a video editor. There is no timeline and no UI. It is five stages with artifacts between them, and a style system that decides how things look so the model never has to.
This repository preserves the system, not the videos. Skills, style files and the scripts that run the pipeline. Footage, renders, transcripts and per-job reports are all excluded, because they are either regenerable or belong to a particular video.
| # | Stage | What happens | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Setup | Workspace, brand file, style files. Once, ever. | Claude |
| 1 | Rough cut | Transcribe every word with timings, decide what goes, cut and stitch. | WhisperX + FFmpeg |
| 2 | Graphics | Decide which lines earn a graphic, then build each as code. | HyperFrames |
| 3 | B-roll | Generate footage for beats that have none. | HyperFrames + Higgsfield |
| 4 | Finishing | Captions, music bed, sound effects, then review. | FFmpeg |
| 5 | Export | Promote one final file, retire the rest. | FFmpeg |
Taste is permanent, jobs are disposable. brand.md and styles/ hold six colours,
two fonts, measured zones and a set of hard rules. projects/<job>/ holds one video. The
model reads the first and never invents from the second.
Everything is measured, nothing is assumed. Delivery resolution is probed from the source. Panel treatment is sampled from the luma under each card. Graphic zones come from vertical luma strips of the actual footage, not a template. The speaker's silhouette is measured, not guessed.
Gates, not vibes. Cuts snap to the frame grid and the splice fails above 40ms of cumulative drift. The composite fails above 8% duplicate frames. A cue that falls outside its own part fails the build. A bright browser window with no bookmark blur refuses to render at all.
Verify content, not just counts. The newest hard rule and the most expensive one to
learn. See rule 11 in CLAUDE.md.
CLAUDE.md the contract, and twelve hard rules that outrank everything
brand.md six colours, two fonts, a caption voice, a mishear list
styles/editorial/ style.md (how) + style.json (whether) + a checker enforcing the split
.claude/skills/ the five stage skills plus one video-type skill
projects/<job>/ per-job scripts; everything they produce is gitignored
CLAUDE.mdfor the hard rules. Each one records the failure that produced it..claude/skills/graphics/SKILL.mdis the biggest, and its gotchas are all real: a<video>transformed in a headless render vanishes silently; an overlay missingeof_action=passproduces perfectly constant-frame-rate judder; a looped still at the head of a filter chain once wrote a 142GB file.projects/*/transcript/andgraphics-build/for the working scripts: frame-exact splicing with a drift gate, join de-glitching, loudness-relative audio mixing, panel treatment sampled from the footage, and an SRT builder that repairs transcription mishears the pipeline deliberately kept.
A filesystem loss would still cost you the things git is the wrong tool for:
- Source footage. Irreplaceable. Back it up separately.
- The sound-effects library and licensed music. Re-purchasable, tedious.
- Fonts. Satoshi is free for commercial use but redistribution of the files is not permitted, so they are referenced here and never vendored. Re-download from Fontshare.
Tuned against HyperFrames 0.8.3, Node 26, FFmpeg 9.0 and WhisperX 3.8.6. A silent upgrade breaks renders that were already signed off, so nothing floats.