stage-decide

stage-decide

The hard, valuable part of editing real footage is not executing a cut you already chose — it is figuring out WHAT to cut: understanding opaque raw material, removing its intrinsic defects (dead air, fillers, weak takes), and reducing it without losing the point. This skill is the "understand → decide" layer; stage-edit executes the cuts you land on.

Host-neutral: describe what to produce; the host provides the operations. In Orkas, use skill scripts: stage-edit edit_video --op trim_silence / --op remove_fillers (deterministic auto-cuts that return evidence), stage-edit analyze_media --op scenes (cut candidates), --op quality (blur/exposure/black/freeze flags), video_studio op: "speech.transcribe" for transcription, and stage-edit analyze_media --op silence.

Use this when

The user supplies real footage AND the work is to select or clean, not to run a known edit: "cut this 40-min recording to a 2-min highlight", "remove the ums and dead air", "make 3 clips from this podcast", "tighten this talking-head". If they already gave you timecodes ("trim 0:10–0:35"), skip this — that is plain stage-edit.

Method

1. Understand the material first (never decide against footage you have not measured):
   • probe for duration/resolution.
   • Spoken footage → use video_studio op: "speech.transcribe" so you cut on sentence/word boundaries, never mid-word.
   • Visual reduction → scenes for shot boundaries; bound the moments you keep on these candidates.
   • Dead air → silence to see the gaps.
2. Decide — deterministic first, judgment second:
   • Cleaning is mechanical — use the auto-cuts: trim_silence (drop dead air), remove_fillers (transcribe → drop um/uh). They are reliable and return the spans they removed.
   • Build a candidate pool first — turn the signals into a structured list of selectable pieces: each transcript sentence (spoken footage) or scene segment (visual footage), annotated with its timecode, duration, and quality flags/score. Select FROM this list — do not eyeball raw footage.
   • Selection is judgment — when picking highlights / reducing length, ground EACH kept span on a measured signal (a scene boundary, a transcript sentence, a scored moment). Keep whole sentences; pad cuts so they are not jarring; for a talking-head the jump-cut keeps audio and video in sync — do not desync the lips.
   • Best take among repeats — when the same line was recorded several times, do NOT guess: write a takes.json ([{id, text=the take's transcript, quality_score from "quality", duration_sec}]) and call "$ORKAS_NODE" "$ORKAS_PC_DIR/bin/run-skill.cjs" stage-plan video_plan -- --op rank_takes --takes project/takes.json. It groups the repeats and tells you which to KEEP (best quality) and which to drop. Choosing what to keep across DIFFERENT moments is still your judgment; this only resolves "which of these identical takes".
   • Quality triage — quality flags bad shots (blurry / too dark / over-exposed / black / frozen). Drop or avoid flagged spans; blur is content-relative (compare, do not threshold blindly), dark / black / freeze are absolute defects.
   • Visual / silent footage (no speech) — the content is in the PICTURE, so transcript is empty. Sample frames at candidate moments with stage-edit edit_video --op extract_frame and JUDGE THEM YOURSELF if you can see images (you are the vision — no separate vision model). If you CANNOT see images, ground on scenes + quality only and mark every visual judgment UNVERIFIED, or ask the user which moments matter — NEVER invent what is on screen, and never escalate to a separate billable vision model.
3. Record the edit strategy and references. Write plan.json::edit_strategy with deterministic/mixed mode, concrete objectives, only the transcript/OCR/scene/silence/quality/vision signals actually used, and non-overlapping preserve/may-change boundaries. Record every source or guiding image/video in top-level references; video timing or motion guidance needs temporal anchors.
4. Record evidence — make every cut auditable. For each kept/cut segment in plan.json, set reason (why this moment), confidence, and evidence (the auto-cut tools return removed/kept spans; for your own selections, cite the signal). This is the whole point — not a black box.
5. Produce the tightened clip (the auto-cut tools output it directly; for selection, trim the kept spans and concat per stage-edit).