Media

Module 02 · by AMLLC

Clip Grazing

Turn one long talking-head recording into a week of captioned vertical clips. You don't chop at random — you graze the whole thing for only the tight, self-contained moments, then cut them 9:16 with burned-in captions. Runs on your own machine, footage never leaves your disk.

Guide $12 one-time Build $500+ done for you Stack Whisper · ffmpeg · Skill

Instant access — the reader opens right after payment and the skill file is yours to download. Or read chapter one free as a member.

The result

What you end up with

A repeatable pipelineDrop a video, transcribe, say "graze the drops." Captioned 9:16 clips come back into a published folder.

Editorial cuts, not blind chopsIt walks the whole recording and keeps only self-contained moments with a hook in the first line.

Captions that read on a phoneLato, heavy white with a dark outline, lower third, synced to the word. Burned in, no editor needed.

The skill itself, yours to keepThe packaged .skill file loads into your assistant and runs locally. Buy once, own the workflow.

See it work

Real output from the pipeline

Three clips grazed from one 68-second recording. Each 9:16 clip sits in a 16:9 frame with a blurred side-fill — the trick that keeps every piece of media on your site the same shape.

clip_1 · 12s — the hook is a question the clip answers on its own.

clip_2 · 13s — a self-contained question and payoff, no setup required.

clip_3 · 16s — the finish, closed by a punchy tagline.

The math

Stop renting the workflow.

Renting a clipping SaaS

Subscription$19–49 /mo

Export caps, watermark removalupsells

Your raw footage uploaded to their cloudrequired

Per year$300+

Your own skill

Runs on your machine$0 /mo

Whisper + ffmpeg — both free$0

Footage never leaves your disklocal

Per year~$0

What doesn't change: you still need a decent recording and a few minutes of taste picking the moments. Everything above that — the subscription, the export caps, and uploading your unedited footage to someone else's servers — goes away. The skill runs the same whether you cut three clips a month or three hundred.

The pipeline: source video to captioned clips, start to finish.

Before you start

What you need

All free, all local. Have these installed and the pipeline runs uninterrupted.

01HomebrewThe macOS package manager — installs the two tools below in one line each.GET IT → 02ffmpegExtracts audio and cuts the captioned clips. brew install ffmpeg.GET IT → 03Whisper (via pipx)Local transcription with word timestamps. pipx install openai-whisper.GET IT → 04A talking-head recordingAny long-form video where someone is talking — an interview, a demo, a livestream.READ →

The skill file itself is included with the guide — download it from the top of the reader after purchase.

Inside the module

The pipeline, step by step

What grazing actually means

Walk the whole recording and keep only the tight, self-contained moments. The editorial test that separates a keeper from filler.

Get the audio out of the video

Extract a 16kHz mono WAV so transcription is fast and portable — never push the heavy video through a model.

Transcribe with word timestamps

Run Whisper locally, free and private. Why word-level timing is the raw material for every clean cut and caption.

Graze the transcript

Read it like an editor, snap picks to word edges, pad and tighten. Deliver a pick list before you cut anything.

Caption and cut the 9:16 clip

Word-synced captions burned in with libass, Lato lower-third. No-crop for vertical source, center-crop for 16:9.

Consistent media: the 16:9 blurred frame

Fit every vertical clip into a uniform 16:9 frame with a blurred fill so all your page media matches.

Ship it as a skill

Package the workflow as a .skill your assistant loads, triggered by hand — the folder convention and the one spoken command.

Gotchas from the real build

Blocked model downloads, cloud-only files that won't mount, ffmpeg eating stdin. The failures, and the one-line fixes.

Who it's for

Made for the person who records

You should read this if you make long-form video — interviews, demos, livestreams, podcasts with a camera — and want a steady stream of vertical clips without paying a SaaS or an editor every month.

Skip it if you don't record talking-head content, or you're happy uploading your raw footage to someone else's cloud and living inside their export caps.

Or skip the reading entirely — apply to have the whole pipeline and skill set up on your machine for you, from $500.

Two doors

Read it, or hand it to us.

Do it yourself

Get the guide

$12 one-time

The full 8-chapter reader with every command, plus the packaged skill file to download and load into your assistant. Yours to keep, updated as the pipeline improves.

Done for you

Have it built

$500+ per build

We set up the whole pipeline on your machine — ffmpeg, local Whisper, the skill, and your folder convention — and cut a first batch with you. Apply, we scope it, you approve a fixed price first.

Apply to have it built