Short-Form Video Pipeline

Problem

Producing short-form video consistently is a scheduling problem disguised as a creative one. I wanted the mechanical half — script, matched footage, captions, music bed, render — automated and running on hardware I already own, rather than paying per minute for hosted generation.

My role

This is a fork of the open-source MoneyPrinterTurbo project by harry0703, which provides the core generator. Upstream authors hold the majority of the commit history and deserve the credit for the foundation. My contribution is the homelab integration and a set of extensions: a licensed music pool so audio is cleared for use, "content packs" that separate an account's identity from the generation machinery, insight measurement that goes beyond hashtag counting, and a motion-clip pool bounded by wall-clock time.

Constraints

• One GPU, shared with a local LLM stack and a second brain that runs a morning briefing. Video generation must not starve the things that run on a schedule.
• The public demo has no GPU at all, so the same codebase has to degrade to CPU-only.

Architecture

Topic to script to matched footage to subtitles to music to rendered short. Hardware-accelerated encode and local speech-to-text on the workstation; the same stack deployed CPU-only behind the homelab's reverse proxy as a public demo.

Outcome

Two live deployments from one codebase. Roughly 57 commits of my own on top of upstream, concentrated in the scheduling, licensing and resource-contention work rather than the generator itself.

What I'd do differently

The bug I remember is a resource-contention one, and it taught me something general: a job queued by a scheduler inherits a fresh duration budget, not the remaining wall-clock window. Something meant to run overnight ran four hours into the working day, holding the GPU that the morning briefing needed. A duration limit can never bound a wall clock — if a job must be finished by a time, that time has to be the constraint you actually encode.