What Building My First Video Tool Really Taught Me
This series started with one annoyed person cutting movie clips by hand, and it ends with a small workshop of tools: a…
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Moving My Video Tool Into the Browser With FFmpeg and WebAssembly
A desktop tool has a wall around it: installation. To use mine you needed Python, FFmpeg on the PATH, and my script,…
The Word Automatically Was Hiding Three Hard Problems
The plan sounded easy when I said it out loud. The tool joins the clips, then adds captions automatically. One sentence. But…
Composing the Final Video, and a Preview That Saved Me
The two tools I had built, one to break a movie into clips and one to join clips together, were really steps…
Building a Second Tool to Join Clips Into Finished Videos
By now I had a tool that could pull clips out of any movie. But that was only half of what I…
Adding Interval and Screenshot Modes by Reusing What I Had
By this point my tool did one thing well. It found scene changes and cut clips from them. But the more I…
The Small Feature That Got Complicated the Moment I Allowed Combinations
Once my tool could find scenes quickly, I added what felt like a tiny feature. Instead of always cutting from the middle…
Rebuilding My Video Tool’s Engine With FFmpeg Scene Detection
My tool looked cleaner now, and it was lighter underneath after cutting the scene detection library. But I had left a hole.…
How I Built My First Video Tool in Python, and Why It Started as a Mess
Everyone says start small. My first real project was not small at all. It was a desktop tool to turn long movies…