video-repurposing

Video Repurposing

Turns long-form video into platform-ready clips with captions. FFmpeg for fast CLI operations, Remotion for styled compositions you can preview before rendering. Battle-tested on a real LinkedIn publishing pipeline; the rules below exist because breaking them produced visibly worse clips.

Rules (Always Enforce)

Opening Clip (CRITICAL):

• The first clip is the hook - it must grab attention immediately
• Must start at the start of a complete sentence or idea with an explicit subject
• NEVER start with joining words ("But", "And", "So", "Now", "Then", "However")
• NEVER start with pronouns without context ("It", "This", "That", "They", "These", "There")
• NEVER start with filler, hedging, or weak openers ("I think", "You know", "Basically")
• Review the full transcript and deliberately select the strongest possible opening - a hook, an insight, a bold statement, or a compelling question

Closing Clip (CRITICAL):

• Must end at the natural conclusion of a thought - never trailing off, never a hard stop mid-idea
• Should leave the viewer with a takeaway, a call-to-action, or a sense of closure
• If the last word sounds like it leads into something else, keep going until it resolves
• Good endings: a summary statement, a strong opinion, a forward-looking insight
• Bad endings: trailing off, abrupt cuts, filler, unrelated tangents

Clean Cut Points (every cut, no exceptions):

• Cuts happen at a natural pause in the content - never mid-sentence, never mid-word
• Respect the idea, not just the words: a cut is clean when the speaker just finished a complete thought and there is a natural breath after the last word
• Every clip must be a complete, standalone thought with an explicit subject
• The stitched video must tell a coherent story, not feel like random fragments

Editing modes - pick ONE in intake:

1. Hard-cut mode (DEFAULT for social clips: LinkedIn, TikTok, Reels). No transitions. Ever. No fades on video or audio, no crossfades, no dissolves. Clip ends on one frame, the next begins on the very next frame. Audio starts and stops at full volume. Clean hard cuts read as confident and native on social feeds; fades read as template-ware. Build with plain <Sequence> blocks + premountFor={60} (see Composition Rules below). Do not use TransitionSeries - it has a null-props bug that crashes Studio in current Remotion versions.
2. Crossfade mode (optional, for trailers/teasers/montages when the user explicitly wants blended transitions). NEVER allow overlapping audio noise: cosine curves only (audio fade-out 1.5s, fade-in 1.2s, visual crossfade 1s), no fade-in on the first clip, no fade-out on the last. See references/transitions.md for the createVolumeFn pattern and the TransitionSeries bug workaround.