render-split-screen-creator
Assemble a split-screen creator ad from a config: a two-zone vertical (1080×1920, 9:16, ~40s) format where an AI creator talking-head anchors the BOTTOM ~48% of the frame and real 16:9 product/demo clips run uncropped in the TOP ~52%, a 3px brand-color divider between the zones. The creator delivers the whole VO cold-to-camera and each top clip proves the claim its VO line makes. This capability is the FREE, deterministic assembly + captions — the two-zone composite (contain-fit + blurred-cover fill + divider + creator slice), the hard-concat, the end card, and the word-level caption burn from the assembled cut.
scripts/config.example.json is the worked example (Perplexity concept-10
"Bloomberg terminal", ~40s 1080×1920 9:16, 6 scenes + an end card);
scripts/PIPELINE.md maps every config block to its source step and
scripts/README.md documents the free assembly.
Run
This is the FREE, deterministic assembly + captions stage — it spends
nothing. The paid inputs are separate steps — the VO (create-vo-elevenlabs,
ElevenLabs eleven_v3 with-timestamps, sliced into per-scene windows), the
photoreal MEDIUM chest-up AI-creator anchor (create-image-gpt-image-fal,
gpt-image-2) — shot at a natural webcam distance (headroom + shoulders, real
room), not a plain-background close-up headshot (see the anchor note below), and
the whole-VO lip-sync (a paid VEED Fabric 1.0 @ 720p take — a no-atom step,
image_url = the anchor, audio_url = the vo mp3, ~$0.15/sec, ~$5.90 for a 39s
VO; run its calls sequentially, veed/fabric-1.0 storage-auths 403 under
parallel load). Given the creator lip-sync take + the per-scene VO timing + one
16:9 top clip per scene + the scene-1 hook graphic + the end-card clip,
render-split-screen-creator composites the two zones, hard-concats the scenes,
appends the end card, transcribes the assembled cut, and burns the captions → the
master. Re-cuts reuse the existing VO / lip-sync / clips and cost $0.
Contract (the free assembly)
- Two-zone split, top ~52% / creator ~48%. The TOP zone runs the real 16:9
product/demo clip contain-fit (uncropped), the BOTTOM zone is the creator
lip-sync framed head-to-shoulders: scale-to-width × a small ZOOM (~1.15–1.2)
then crop the zone with a downward offset so the face sits upper-middle and the
shoulders enter the bottom. (A plain cover + crop-toward-top shows only the head and
cuts the shoulders — and it can't rescue an anchor that was shot too close; fix the
anchor distance first.) Tune zoom/offset visually against the source video's creator
framing — it's a FREE re-assemble, no VEED re-run. A 3px brand-color divider separates
the zones. Canvas 1080×1920,
top_height~998. Keep every stacked height EVEN (998 + 4 divider + 918 = 1920) — libx264 rejects odd dimensions. - Anchor = photoreal MEDIUM shot, not a studio headshot. The lip-sync only looks as
good as the anchor. It must be photoreal/candid (real lived-in room, natural skin
cues), framed chest-up at a natural webcam distance (headroom + shoulders), not a
plain-background close-up and not a phone-selfie pose copied from another format
(e.g.
ugc-walk-and-talk). VEED Fabric handles photoreal fine (unlike Seedance). - Blurred-cover fill, never black bars. The top clip's letterbox margins are filled with a darkened blurred cover-scale of the same clip — a flat charcoal/black bar reads cheap.
- One claim per scene, shown as it's said. Each top clip is windowed
(
top_start/top_end) to the on-message segment that proves its VO line. Never loop a short clip — set the window and the assembler speed-fits it to the scene (looping replays into a sparse/black tail). - The creator VO is the entire audio bed — no separate music. Body audio =
the concatenated creator VO slices, timed per the per-scene
timing.json; the lip-sync drives the mouth. - Hard-concat the scenes; end card on the last SHARP frame. Hard-cut concat
(no dissolves); append the end card holding the last sharp frame ~3s. If the
end-card clip fades to black, hold the last sharp second (
endcard.clip_end), not the black tail. - Caption the ASSEMBLED cut, not the raw VO. Concat drops inter-scene
silence, so the ad timeline ≠ the VO timeline; only the final cut's audio
yields correct caption timing. Transcribe the assembled cut with local Whisper,
build word-level cues (sentence-aware chunking), burn the ASS in the chosen
style (
serif-accent,kinetic-pop, …). Keep the-precaptioncut + the.asssidecar so captions restyle without re-rendering the composite. If the host ffmpeg lacks libass, render the cues as timed PIL PNG overlays (ffmpegoverlay=…:enable='between(t,st,en)') at the same placement. - FFmpeg composite, deterministic, FREE. Two-zone composite per scene,
hard-concat, append the end card, mux the creator VO,
loudnorm I=-14→ a 1080×1920 h264+aac master. No paid calls, no keys — the VEED Fabric lip-sync is a supplied input, produced upstream.
