Stage Decide

stage-decide

The hard, valuable part of editing real footage is not executing a cut you already chose — it is figuring out WHAT to cut: understanding opaque raw material, removing its intrinsic defects (dead air, fillers, weak takes), and reducing it without losing the point. This skill is the "understand → decide" layer; stage-edit executes the cuts you land on.

Describe what to produce; the operations run through the CLI (or the equivalent MCP tool): ovs edit trim-silence / ovs edit remove-fillers (deterministic auto-cuts that return evidence), ovs scenes (cut candidates), ovs quality (blur/exposure/black/freeze flags), ovs transcribe --out (word timings saved as JSON), ovs silence.

Use this when

The user supplies real footage AND the work is to select or clean, not to run a known edit: "cut this 40-min recording to a 2-min highlight", "remove the ums and dead air", "make 3 clips from this podcast", "tighten this talking-head". If they already gave you timecodes ("trim 0:10–0:35"), skip this — that is plain stage-edit.

Method

1. Understand the material first (never decide against footage you have not measured):
   • ovs edit probe for duration/resolution.
   • Spoken footage → ovs transcribe raw/clip.mp4 --out project/transcripts/clip.json (word-level timings) so you cut on sentence/word boundaries, never mid-word.
   • Visual reduction → ovs scenes for shot boundaries; bound the moments you keep on these candidates.
   • Dead air → ovs silence to see the gaps.
2. Decide — deterministic first, judgment second:
   • Cleaning is mechanical — use the auto-cuts: ovs edit trim-silence (drop dead air), ovs edit remove-fillers (transcribe → drop um/uh). They are reliable and return the spans they removed.
   • Build a candidate pool first — turn the signals into a structured list of selectable pieces: each transcript sentence (spoken footage) or scene segment (visual footage), annotated with its timecode, duration, and quality flags/score. Select FROM this list — do not eyeball raw footage.
   • Selection is judgment — when picking highlights / reducing length, ground EACH kept span on a measured signal (a scene boundary, a transcript sentence, a scored moment). Keep whole sentences; pad cuts so they are not jarring; for a talking-head the jump-cut keeps audio and video in sync — do not desync the lips.
   • Best take among repeats — when the same line was recorded several times, do NOT guess: write a takes.json ([{id, text=the take's transcript, quality_score from ovs quality, duration_sec}]) and run ovs plan rank-takes takes.json. It groups the repeats and tells you which to KEEP (best quality) and which to drop. Choosing what to keep across DIFFERENT moments is still your judgment; this only resolves "which of these identical takes".
   • Quality triage — ovs quality flags bad shots (blurry / too dark / over-exposed / black / frozen). Drop or avoid flagged spans; blur is content-relative (compare, do not threshold blindly), dark / black / freeze are absolute defects.
   • Visual / silent footage (no speech) — the content is in the PICTURE, so transcript is empty. Sample frames at candidate moments with ovs edit extract-frame and JUDGE THEM YOURSELF if you can see images (you are the vision — no separate vision model). If you CANNOT see images, ground on ovs scenes + ovs quality only and mark every visual judgment UNVERIFIED, or ask the user which moments matter — NEVER invent what is on screen, and never escalate to a separate vision model.
3. Record strategy and references. Write plan.json#edit_strategy with deterministic/mixed mode, concrete objectives, and only evidence signals actually used. New work uses transcript/scene/silence/quality/vision signals; ocr remains readable only in historical plans. Keep preserve/may-change boundaries non-overlapping. Record every source or guiding image/video in top-level references; video timing/motion guidance needs temporal anchors.
4. Record evidence — make every cut auditable. For each kept/cut segment in plan.json, set reason (why this moment), confidence, and evidence (the auto-cut tools return removed/kept spans; for your own selections, cite the signal). This is the whole point — not a black box.
5. Produce the tightened clip (the auto-cut tools output it directly; for selection, trim the kept spans and concat per stage-edit).

Honest ceiling — present a DRAFT, let the user decide

• High confidence (ship it): silence/filler removal, transcript-driven sentence selection, quality filtering. These are deterministic and proven.
• Low confidence (mark it, never claim it is "right"): narrative arc, emotional beats, comedic timing, "does this cut FEEL right". These are subjective with no ground truth. Offer the rough cut as a first pass, flag the low-confidence calls, and invite the user to adjust at the draft gate.

Never over-claim. An evidence-backed rough cut the user can audit and tweak beats a confident black box.