broll-pick

Selects B-roll cutaways for one short. Claude reads the clip transcript + chunks.json (from chunk-captions) + the source ingest.json, picks the 3-5 strongest visualizable nouns/topics (NOUN/VERB/EMOTION/PIVOT), and spawns multiple short cutaway windows per topic — each intercut with the speaker, each preferring distinct footage. Windows are expressed as whole chunk-index ranges so no cut lands mid-word.

Per window: keyless YouTube discovery via the mcptube-bundled yt-dlp (ytsearchN:<query> — mcptube discover is NOT used, it requires an LLM API key the stack doesn't have), then mcptube add the candidate, sample 3 frames via mcptube frame, and show Claude the frame grid (claude -p vision) to pick the best on-subject shot or reject. On reject, the query is rewritten once (literal↔metaphorical) and retried; a second miss drops the window — no fallback footage. Chosen segments download via yt-dlp --download-sections into work/<id>/broll/broll_NN.mp4.

Invoke

.claude/skills/broll-pick/broll-pick.sh <clip_transcript.json> <chunks.json> <ingest.json> <out_broll_plan.json>

• clip_transcript: per-clip transcript with words[] (clip-local times)
• chunks: chunk-captions output (chunks[] with t0/t1/text)
• ingest: work/<id>/ingest.json (title + source url)
• out: path for broll_plan.json; b-roll clips land in <ingest_dir>/broll/

Env

• BROLL_VISION_CAP (default 10) — max Claude vision calls per clip.
• BROLL_PICK=0 — disable; emits an empty plan.
• MCPTUBE_BIN, MCPTUBE_YTDLP — override binary paths.

Output (broll_plan.json)

{
  "picks": [
    {"t0": 4.31, "t1": 6.02, "topic": "hippopotamus", "anchor_word": "hippo",
     "query": "hippo swimming underwater", "clip_path": "/abs/work/<id>/broll/broll_03.mp4",
     "source": {"video_id": "abc123XYZ", "title": "...", "url": "https://youtu.be/abc123XYZ",
                "t0_src": 12.4, "t1_src": 14.1},
     "verified": true}
  ],
  "ingested_video_ids": ["abc123XYZ"],
  "vision_calls_used": 4,
  "vision_cap": 10,
  "chunks_mtime": 1746000000.0
}

No anchors / all queries miss → {"picks": [], "ingested_video_ids": []}, exit 0.

Idempotency

Caches on transcript+chunks+ingest mtimes via <out>.pickmeta.

Notes

• Records every mcptube add-ed video_id in ingested_video_ids for broll-cleanup. Never the podcast source (filtered by ingest url id).
• CPU: 3 frames per candidate, reuses _lib/encode.sh thread caps downstream.