Reverse-engineer another creator's editing into a rebuildable style guide
Ready nowCapture a reference video, extract motion strips and flipbooks, write a style guide PDF and motion recipes mapped to the shell library so the editor can rebuild the style rather than admire it.
Kit
video-offline-tools, shell-library
You need
| Account | Why | Free or paid | Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| yt-dlp | Downloads YouTube, TikTok and Instagram video, auto-captions and comments for vaults, B-roll, MIDI extraction and quote verification. | Free | Free. |
| ffmpeg + ffprobe | Every cut, mux, loudness pass, proxy, contact sheet and platform encode. The delivery encoder uses h264_videotoolbox on Apple Silicon. | Free | Free (Homebrew build includes VideoToolbox). |
| mlx-whisper (local transcription, Apple Silicon) | Word-level transcripts for rough cuts, captions, chapter timestamps and YouTube descriptions, all offline. | Free | Free; needs an Apple Silicon Mac with 16 GB+ RAM. Model whisper-large-v3-turbo downloads once (about 1.6 GB). |
| Playwright + headless Chrome (and Safari for the final check) | Renders pages to PNG for visual QA, drives the dashboard verification protocol, captures library stills, renders HTML titles and animations offline. | Free | Free. Google Chrome installed for headless screenshots; Playwright installs its own Chromium and WebKit. |
| Google AI Studio (Gemini API) | Image generation (gemini-2.5-flash-image) for slides, blog images and placeholders; video analysis in the n8n research agent; the external second-eyes review of video rounds. | Free tier available | Free tier works (rate limited, roughly 5 to 15 requests per minute). Add billing for volume image generation. |
What you bring
- A reference video you want to edit like
The steps
- Capture: download, transcribe, detect every change, label by eye
- Categories: one section per edit type with peak stills and measured properties
- Motion strips and flipbooks: the how, measured
- Build the guide, render it, read it, hand it over
- Fold into the shells, only on your go
- Cite the capture from every beat you build
Get the full playbook
Part of: Install your video editing suite