caption-clips

caption-clips — ONE caption style for everything

🔒 LOCKED CAPTION LESSONS (2026-06-12) — every one shipped a wrong burnt caption; do not regress

Caption-text errors are INVISIBLE to audio QC (the audio is fine; the wrong word is only on screen). They must be caught by scanning the .ass/subs.ass text or OCR'ing frames — never assumed clean.

1. "one" defaults to the WORD, never the digit "1". In conversational speech "one" is almost always the pronoun/article ("no one", "one of the most", "the one thing", "is one of"). spice_format.py numeralizes to "1" ONLY via positive signals: money, an adjacent number, or listicle "number/step/day one" → "#1" (handled downstream on the WORD form, so keeping the word never breaks "#1"). Defaulting to "1" shipped "no 1 will care" AND "judgment is 1" in one batch. If you touch number rules, re-run the probe set (pronoun forms: "no one", "the one", "one of"; listicle: "number one", "step one"; money: "one hundred million").
2. ASR hallucinates rhetorical tags ("right?") that were never spoken — and the chain BURNS them. Whisper pattern-completes a tag from the clip's parallel structure ("take the risk, right? … shake off the losses…" → invents a second "right?"). It appears in BOTH the QC re-transcript and the caption transcription. To DISPROVE: isolate the exact source region (ffmpeg -ss X -t 0.5 -af volume=12dB) and transcribe it ALONE — context-free boosted audio can't be pattern-completed. To FIX: pin a hand-corrected word list and pass --words (skips per-render ASR → deterministic captions across re-renders too).
3. --corrections {"heard":"burned"} for reviewer-flagged single-word mis-hears (e.g. "quadruple"→ "quadrupled") without re-cutting. Applied to the transcription before formatting.
4. The render captions stage content-hashes these scripts (spice_format / spice_caption / generate_spice / caption_director) into its cache VERSION (render/stages/captions.py). So editing ANY of them auto-invalidates every caption cache — a script fix re-renders instead of silently serving a stale burn (which it used to: the "no 1"→"no one" fix appeared to do nothing until this was added).