#image-processing

The procedure that turns each new chapter of a story into a narrated video: an AI agent runs every stage behind gates that refuse unfinished work, while I start each stage, review the chapter, and render it myself.

Free converters stamp a watermark on web assets by design. Four small ffmpeg wrappers do the job locally, and the watermark was the least of it: the real work was choosing the quality, preset and GIF palette flags ffmpeg lets you get wrong.

Photos into one PDF, a PDF under two megabytes, a layout inspected page by page — usually done by uploading to a stranger's website. Three small tools do it locally with Pillow and Ghostscript; the only real decisions were which defaults to bake in.