Question 1

Is this one-click video?

Accepted Answer

No, and deliberately not. You pick the title and you sign off the script. Everything between and after those two points — research, voiceover, footage, scene plan, render, QA stills, cover, distribution copy — the agent does. Those two stay with you because the title sets the angle of the whole piece and the script carries the factual liability. If you want a tool that publishes without you reading it, this is the wrong one.

Question 2

Can I use it for a different beat than yours?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Nothing about the beat is hardcoded. Three config files, edited once: persona and positioning, your source list, and 20–50 filter keywords. The method is fixed; the beat is yours. Switching from EV coverage to biotech means editing those three files and nothing else.

Question 3

Does it work in Chinese or Japanese?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with configuration. We run a Chinese channel on this pipeline — one of those cuts passed 130,000 views. Two things to set: point the plan's font at a face that has the glyphs, because ffmpeg's drawtext does not fall back when handed an explicit fontfile and will draw empty boxes while still exiting 0; and choose the matching voice, for example zh-CN-YunxiNeural. One thing to work around: the caption line-breaker splits on spaces, so in a script that has none, keep each cue inside the line limit (30 characters at 9:16, 40 at 16:9) instead of relying on it to wrap — a cue under that limit passes through untouched. What ships is set up for English: the docs, the config templates and the default voice.

Question 4

What do I have to install, and does it cost anything?

Accepted Answer

Node 18+, ffmpeg (with libfreetype and libx264), ffprobe, yt-dlp and edge-tts. All free, all open source, no API keys and no accounts. Run the included doctor.mjs before anything else — one command tells you exactly what is missing and how to install it, and it exits non-zero so a broken setup cannot slip past. It checks fonts too, because a missing font makes ffmpeg substitute a face and return success.

Question 5

Who owns the footage, and is the voice licensed?

Accepted Answer

Footage rights are yours to clear. The pipeline fetches from public channels for commentary and citation, prefers first-party sources, and credits the source on screen — but whether a given clip is cleared for your commercial use is your call, not something a script can decide. The voiceover is edge-tts, which is free and runs on your machine; it is synthetic, every platform has a disclosure control, and you should use it. What you are buying is the method and the code, under a commercial licence included in the package.

Question 6

Why four skills instead of one?

Accepted Answer

Because they activate at different moments and you will often want just one. topic-scan when you are deciding what to cover, script-writing when you already have the story, news-short-video when you already have the script. The fourth, video-pipeline, chains them and owns the seams — which is where this kind of thing actually breaks: facts arriving unverified, a word-count line getting read aloud by the TTS, a script written to the wrong length for the platform it is going to. All four install together from one archive into ~/.claude/skills.

Short-video pipeline: topic → script → finished cut