render-split-screen-creator

Assemble a split-screen creator ad from a config: a two-zone vertical (1080×1920, 9:16, ~40s) format where an AI creator talking-head anchors the BOTTOM ~48% of the frame and real 16:9 product/demo clips run uncropped in the TOP ~52%, a 3px brand-color divider between the zones. The creator delivers the whole VO cold-to-camera and each top clip proves the claim its VO line makes. This capability is the FREE, deterministic assembly + captions — the two-zone composite (contain-fit + blurred-cover fill + divider + creator slice), the hard-concat, the end card, and the word-level caption burn from the assembled cut.

scripts/config.example.json is one worked example (Perplexity concept-10 "Bloomberg terminal", ~40s 1080×1920 9:16, 6 scenes + an end card) — copy its structure, never its creative values; scripts/PIPELINE.md maps every config block to its source step and scripts/README.md documents the free assembly.

Choices

The creative calls are made upstream by the user (the calling format's recipe choices) and arrive here as config. This capability never picks them.

• creator_gender / creator_age / creator_look — who the creator is (creator.brief); shapes the anchor and the voice upstream. Here it only affects framing checks. The worked example used a man in his 20s.
• setting — where the creator films from (creator.brief.vibe_setting). The worked example used a lived-in room with window daylight.
• tone — the script and VO delivery; upstream only. The worked example was a confident, fast explainer.
• caption_style — captions.style (serif-accent, kinetic-pop, neon-glow, clean-bubble). Burned here. The worked example shipped serif-accent.

If a creative field is empty in the config, ask for it — don't fall back to the worked example's value.

Run

This is the FREE, deterministic assembly + captions stage — it spends nothing. The paid inputs are separate steps — the VO (create-vo-elevenlabs, ElevenLabs eleven_v3 with-timestamps, sliced into per-scene windows), the photoreal MEDIUM chest-up AI-creator anchor (create-image-gpt-image-fal, gpt-image-2) — shot at a natural webcam distance (headroom + shoulders, real room), not a plain-background close-up headshot (see the anchor note below), and the whole-VO lip-sync (a paid VEED Fabric 1.0 @ 720p take — a no-atom step, image_url = the anchor, audio_url = the vo mp3, ~$0.15/sec, ~$5.90 for a 39s VO; run its calls sequentially, veed/fabric-1.0 storage-auths 403 under parallel load). Given the creator lip-sync take + the per-scene VO timing + one 16:9 top clip per scene + the scene-1 hook graphic + the end-card clip, render-split-screen-creator composites the two zones, hard-concats the scenes, appends the end card, transcribes the assembled cut, and burns the captions → the master. Re-cuts reuse the existing VO / lip-sync / clips and cost $0.

Contract (the free assembly)

• Two-zone split, top ~52% / creator ~48%. The TOP zone runs the real 16:9 product/demo clip contain-fit (uncropped), the BOTTOM zone is the creator lip-sync framed head-to-shoulders: scale-to-width × a small ZOOM (~1.15–1.2) then crop the zone with a downward offset so the face sits upper-middle and the shoulders enter the bottom. (A plain cover + crop-toward-top shows only the head and cuts the shoulders — and it can't rescue an anchor that was shot too close; fix the anchor distance first.) Tune zoom/offset visually against the source video's creator framing — it's a FREE re-assemble, no VEED re-run. A 3px brand-color divider separates the zones. Canvas 1080×1920, top_height ~998. Keep every stacked height EVEN (998 + 4 divider + 918 = 1920) — libx264 rejects odd dimensions.
• Anchor = photoreal MEDIUM shot, not a studio headshot. The lip-sync only looks as good as the anchor. It must be photoreal/candid (real lived-in room, natural skin cues), framed chest-up at a natural webcam distance (headroom + shoulders), not a plain-background close-up and not a phone-selfie pose copied from another format (e.g. ugc-walk-and-talk). VEED Fabric handles photoreal fine (unlike Seedance).
• Blurred-cover fill, never black bars. The top clip's letterbox margins are filled with a darkened blurred cover-scale of the same clip — a flat charcoal/black bar reads cheap.
• One claim per scene, shown as it's said. Each top clip is windowed (top_start/top_end) to the on-message segment that proves its VO line. Never loop a short clip — set the window and the assembler speed-fits it to the scene (looping replays into a sparse/black tail).
• The creator VO is the entire audio bed — no separate music. Body audio = the concatenated creator VO slices, timed per the per-scene timing.json; the lip-sync drives the mouth.
• Hard-concat the scenes; end card on the last SHARP frame. Hard-cut concat (no dissolves); append the end card holding the last sharp frame ~3s. If the end-card clip fades to black, hold the last sharp second (endcard.clip_end), not the black tail.
• Caption the ASSEMBLED cut, not the raw VO. Concat drops inter-scene silence, so the ad timeline ≠ the VO timeline; only the final cut's audio yields correct caption timing. Transcribe the assembled cut with local Whisper, build word-level cues (sentence-aware chunking), burn the ASS in the style set by captions.style (serif-accent, kinetic-pop, …). Keep the -precaption cut + the .ass sidecar so captions restyle without re-rendering the composite. If the host ffmpeg lacks libass, render the cues as timed PIL PNG overlays (ffmpeg overlay=…:enable='between(t,st,en)') at the same placement.
• FFmpeg composite, deterministic, FREE. Two-zone composite per scene, hard-concat, append the end card, mux the creator VO, loudnorm I=-14 → a 1080×1920 h264+aac master. No paid calls, no keys — the VEED Fabric lip-sync is a supplied input, produced upstream.