Edits Hook Overlay

Edits hook overlay

Instagram's native text (Edits / the IG composer) is a look you cannot reproduce exactly in a renderer: its font, per-line rounded boxes and anti-aliasing are Instagram's. This skill gets that exact look onto any number of videos while the phone only ever touches a 6-second template project.

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plate (black 3 s | white 3 s) ──► Edits template project: ONE styled text clip over both halves
        │  per hook: retype text → Export → Download          (scripts/edits_hooks.py)
        ▼
 hook-NN.mp4 (camera roll → pulled over USB)
        │  difference matte                                  (scripts/extract_overlay.py)
        ▼
 hook-NN.png  +  hook-NN-sprite.png  +  hook-NN.json (bbox, checks)
        │  scale · place · time · HLG-safe burn-in            (scripts/apply_overlay.py)
        ▼
 <video>-hook.mp4   × as many videos as you like

Why a black and a white plate, not a mask or chroma key: for every pixel, black = a·C and white = a·C + (1−a), so a = 1 − (white − black) and C = black / a. That recovers Instagram's own soft edges, rounded box corners, outlines and any partial opacity exactly. A key or a threshold mask would eat the anti-aliasing and fringe on the box corners. Both plates must show identical, static text.

Requirements

• An iPhone with Edits, over USB, with WebDriverAgent running and port-forwarded (--wda, default http://localhost:8100) and the screen unlocked. Where that runner and its helper live is machine-specific: see MASTER_CONTEXT.md.
• pymobiledevice3 (camera-roll listing + pull; --pmd3 or PMD3=), ffmpeg/ffprobe (or FFMPEG/FFPROBE), Python 3 with numpy + Pillow.
• No phone? Steps 2–3 work on ANY export of static text over the plate, made by hand.

One-time template (by hand, ~2 minutes)

1. scripts/make_plate.sh plate-bw.mp4 → get it into the phone's Photos (AirDrop, iCloud, or the working repo's phone hand-off).
2. Edits → + → Gallery → the plate → Add. Text → type a placeholder → set the style (e.g. font Classic, emphasis Background = black box / white text; Inverted Background = white box; red text + Background = red box) → Done.
3. Stretch the text clip across the whole plate. Edits gives new text 3 s by default, which only covers the black half: select the clip and drag its right handle past 3 s. No text animation (Animation tab = none); the extractor refuses moving text.
4. Rename the project (project name ▾ → Rename), e.g. HOOK TEMPLATE black box. One template per style; position and size in the template don't matter much, because placement is decided at burn-in.

1. Render the hooks on the phone

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python3 scripts/edits_hooks.py --template "HOOK TEMPLATE black box" --out <project>/exports \
  "FIRST HOOK\nSECOND LINE" "ANOTHER HOOK"

Per hook: open the template from the grid, open the text clip → Edit, delete the old text, type the new one at ~6 keys/s, verify the clip's label equals the hook, Next → (accepts the "export at higher resolution anyway" prompt if Edits shows it) → Download, wait for exactly one new camera-roll MP4, pull it to hook-NN.mp4. Writes hook-manifest.json. About 40 s per hook. It never shares or posts; the template keeps the last hook's text.

Line breaks are yours (\n); Edits wraps long lines on its own. ALL CAPS reads like the native feed titles. Hook copy is public copy: write it from the speaker's own words and run the house copy QA before rendering.

2. Lift each hook out

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python3 scripts/extract_overlay.py <project>/exports/hook-01.mp4 <project>/overlays --name hook-01

Medians many frames from each half (HEVC noise cancels), writes the full-frame RGBA PNG, a cropped -sprite.png and a .json. Gates, read every time: recomposite_mean_abs_err_8bit (re-composite over both plates vs the export; ~0.01 is normal, > 1 means the plates or text differ) and motion_between_black_frames (> 3 = animated text, fix the template). Fails loudly if the text does not cover both halves.

3. Burn it onto videos

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python3 scripts/apply_overlay.py <project>/overlays/hook-01-sprite.png <project>/out \
  video1.mov video2.mp4 … [--center-y 0.165] [--start 0] [--end 3.2] [--trim 8]

• Size: scaled by video_width / export_width, i.e. the size it had in Edits.
• Place: centred horizontally; --center-y = box centre as a fraction of height (native = where it sat in Edits). Check the face and the platform's UI bands in the first frame; a feed-measured title position may sit inside the top UI band, which is a per-account call.
• Time: --start/--end (the native-feed habit is "on from 0 s until the first hard cut").
• HDR (HLG) phone footage stays untouched: the sprite goes through an SDR709→HLG2020 LUT (make_hlg_lut.py, generated once into ~/.cache/edits-hook-overlay/; SDR white → --hlg-white, default 0.91, so text white sits just above skin; BT.2408's 0.75 reads as a grey filter on bright selfies) and is overlaid on the original pixels, out as HEVC Main10 HLG with the source tags. SDR sources → H.264. Audio is stream-copied.

4. Verify, then deliver

• Look at a frame of every output in the medium the reviewer uses. For HLG, use an AVFoundation/Apple SDR frame grab plus a colour-managed conversion, not a naive ffmpeg PNG (that shows HLG as washed-out 709).
• Outside the box the output must match the source (mean abs diff ≈ 1/255 = encode noise).
• Run video-qa on finished edits and deliver on video-review-canvas.

Scaling to a batch

• Same hook on N videos: one export, one apply_overlay.py call with N files.
• Different hook per video: one edits_hooks.py call with all the hook texts (one template, sequential exports), then pair hook i with video i in a loop.
• A new style (red box, white box, outline) = a second template project, made once.

Gotchas