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Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at jidonglab.com

ShortsMaker — Building an automated Shorts video pipeline

Started building a pipeline that auto-generates short-form ad videos. The goal is end-to-end: script in, video out.

Why

Making a single Shorts video manually takes 30+ minutes of editing. For ad purposes, you need to produce many videos in a similar format — doing this by hand doesn't scale.

Repetitive work should be automated. Especially when the format is fixed.

Pipeline architecture

  1. Script input — accept raw text copy
  2. AI TTS — convert text to speech
  3. FFmpeg rendering — composite background video + subtitles + audio
  4. YouTube upload — auto-upload via API
Script → TTS generation → FFmpeg compositing → YouTube upload
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Current progress

  • Modularizing each step in Python
  • FFmpeg command composition is the core — managing subtitle position, font, and timing via templates
  • YouTube Data API v3 integration planned for auto-upload

Next steps

  • Compare TTS engines (Google TTS vs ElevenLabs)
  • Subtitle style template system
  • Batch processing for multiple videos at once

📌 Originally published at Jidong Lab
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