Reelery

In development · first slice working

Know your footage before you edit.

Reelery is an early local video preparation tool. Its first working piece is a footage preflight: point it at a recording and it writes the stream facts, a SHA-256 hash, three real sample frames and an offline review sheet — all on your machine, with your own ffmpeg.

Try the preflight Changelog
Reelery's review sheet for fractal-zoom.mp4: duration 12.00s, picture 1280 × 720, video codec h264, audio stream found, and three sampled frames at 1.20s, 6.00s and 10.80s. The same review sheet in dark mode.

The real report.html Reelery wrote for a generated 12-second test clip. It follows your system's light or dark appearance and loads nothing from the network.

What works today

One command, one honest first look.

Before you cut a recording into anything, see what's actually in the file.

01

Stream facts

Duration, picture size, video codec, frame rate as ffprobe reports it, and whether there's an audio stream at all.

02

Three real frames

PNGs sampled near 10%, 50% and 90% of the recording, so a black opening or a frozen ending shows up before you build on it.

03

Provenance you can check

report.json records the source's path, size and SHA-256, the inspection time and the exact ffprobe and ffmpeg versions used.

04

An offline review sheet

A self-contained report.html puts the frames beside the facts with a checklist for the parts a machine can't judge.

05

Leaves your source alone

The recording is only read. Reelery writes into a new or empty folder, refuses a symlink or a folder with files in it, and cleans up after itself if anything fails.

06

Nothing leaves the machine

All processing runs through your installed ffmpeg and ffprobe. No upload, no account, no network request from the report.

In the terminal

It prints one path, and the folder holds the rest.

A preflight, not a verdict: Reelery doesn't score quality or decide whether footage is fit to publish. Watch and listen to the whole recording yourself — and review the report before sharing it, since it contains the source's full path.

$ python -m reelery inspect ~/footage/fractal-zoom.mp4 --output ~/footage/report
/home/you/footage/report/report.json
$ ls ~/footage/report
frame-01.png  frame-02.png  frame-03.png  report.html  report.json
$ jq '{duration_seconds, video, audio_present}' ~/footage/report/report.json
{
  "duration_seconds": 12.0,
  "video": {
    "codec": "h264",
    "width": 1280,
    "height": 720,
    "frame_rate": "30/1"
  },
  "audio_present": true
}

Where it's going

Revise the script, not the whole video.

The longer-term job: let a creator change a script and get a trustworthy video back without rebuilding every part that didn't change. Only the first step exists. Everything else below is an idea to validate, not a feature.

  1. Footage preflightFacts, hash, frames and a review sheet for a recording.Working now
  2. Script and per-beat audioPlan a video as beats, each with its own checked narration.Not built
  3. Locked timelineRebuild only the beats a script edit touches.Not built
  4. Captions, assembly, checksWith consent and disclosure designed in, not bolted on.Not built

No cost, speed or quality comparison with hosted avatar platforms has been measured, so none is claimed.

Try it

Python, ffmpeg, and a recording.

There's no package to install yet: Reelery runs from a checkout, with nothing beyond the standard library.

From a checkout
git clone https://github.com/aylith-labs/reelery.git
cd reelery
python -m reelery inspect /path/to/recording.mp4 --output /path/to/new-report

Needs Python 3.10 or newer, with ffprobe and ffmpeg on your PATH. Open report.html in any browser.