#video

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.

A recording is two halves and usually only one is broken. Cleaning up the audio repeatedly, without watermarks or caps, needed a filter already compiled into ffmpeg — and eight further decisions that had nothing to do with noise, including the one whose proof is a matching hash.

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.