A short cut from talking footage lives on its words. The framing can be perfect and the short is still unwatchable when it opens on half a sentence or spends its first two seconds on "yeah, no, totally". So the cut is planned from what is said, and checked as what is heard, before anything is built.
Read the footage
Read every source as the footage-analysis skill says for talking footage: a transcript saved as
transcript-<source id>.json, which sets every boundary, and a watch, which picks the moments. A photo has no speech
at all: it is a beat, not a backbone.
Plan the cut
- One pool of moments. Take the watch's candidate moments from every source into one list, each with the source it came from: its times count on that source's clock, as the footage-reframing skill says.
- Snap each to whole thoughts. A clip's
inis a sentence's first word, or a word after a real pause; itsoutis a sentence's last word, or a word before one. The transcript'scutPointsmark the clean ends. - Order and trim to the target. Order the moments by their loops, as the retention-hooks skill says. Aim for the target length within about 15%. When the length and a clean sentence conflict, the sentence wins and the length moves. Never cut a word out of a sentence to save time: the ear hears the splice at once, where the eye would forgive a picture cut.
- Place photos at sentence edges, never inside one, each held long enough to read.
Write the plan as the reel's clip list, the one the footage-reframing skill's scripts/reel_cut.py reads,
with each spoken source's transcript path beside its other fields.
Review it as heard
Run python3 scripts/review_cuts.py reel.json on that same file. It joins each clip's words in
play order into the heard script, and checks three things per clip:
| Check | Fails when | Its repair |
|---|---|---|
| Integrity | an edge cuts through a word, or the clip opens or stops mid-sentence | move that edge to the time given |
| Substance | most of the clip is filler; the opening clip is held to a stricter share | drop it, or take the sentence beside it |
| Fluency | a clip opens on a connective ("but", "so") with nothing before it, or the reel opens on a pronoun no one has been named for | move the in point back to what it refers to, or lead with another clip |
Each clip also lists the speakers its words carry. Use them when the footage-reframing skill asks who a
clip should hold on.
Then read the script yourself, as prose. If it does not hold together as a paragraph, it
will not hold together as a video. The script finds the mechanical faults; whether a clean clip is
worth its seconds is your call.
Apply the repairs to the plan and run it again until it is clean. A repair changes numbers in a plan, so it costs nothing. The review never blocks the cut: if every candidate is thin, build from the strongest and say so in one line.
A clip it marks silent (a photo, a shot with no transcript) is a beat of silence in the heard
script. A segment the transcript returned without word times is checked only at its sentence
edges, and the review says so.