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clips.
Posted on :: 586 Words

Built using Tauri (Rust + React/Typescript), a final iteration1 on a workflow for taking raw (typically 2 min.) video clips and getting them ready to share. A mixture of ffmpeg, AWS S3, and Discord to go from on-disk high bitrate video to short, publicly accessible links with embeddability (that's a big word for Elmo).

Wow, I Can't Believe It's Not ButterBackend-Only!

There's two main views for the app: Queue, what's still left to edit, and Past clips, completed clips. Starting with the queue, clips without any edits yet are marked with a green badge. The custom metadata is surfaced here too, make it a bit easier to contextualize what it's about without watching it.2

When editing a clip, the workflow usually goes something like:

  1. find + go watch the relevant part of the video/why we clipped this,
  2. open up the metadata sidebar and fill it out,
  3. add (1 or more) trims/sections we want in the final clip and drag it to the appropriate times,
  4. use the preview button to watch what the final clip would look like,3
  5. submit it!

Edits are immediately saved. For example, I could fill out only a few of the metadata fields + a trim, and then go watch a different clip or close the app entirely, and they'll still be there the next time I pull it up.

On submission, the backend (in parallel with other submissions):

  1. uses ffmpeg to trim the clip, scale down the bitrate + framerate4, and attach the provided metadata,
  2. generates a short, random filename and uploads to an S3 bucket,
  3. sends the link + a formatted message to a Discord webhook, the latter just being a embed with that same metadata.

(that first step took ~20s longer than I would've liked in the demo above, sorry!)

Watching back clips is pretty straightforward, can seek around the same and view the metadata the same, nothing fancy. Even the delete button points to the same file, however, the intention is different.

  • if a clip is in the queue, deleting it means the original 2 min. clip (obviously, there's no other file to delete yet). Nothing interesting enough happened, so the whole thing is discarded.
  • if the clip is already edited, it still deletes the original 2 min. clip, not the final trimmed one. The main goal here is to reclaim large amounts of redundant disk space quickly, since the original files range from several hundred MB to 2 GB, and (unfortunately) there's a lot of clips.
1

I went from manually typing out ffmpeg commands for each clip, to a fish shell script with CLI args, to a surprisingly nice Windows application.

2

a clip's metadata can also be edited right from this view using that database-looking icon.

3

yes, if there are multiple trims, it'll play in order + skip to the next immediately after the previous ends.

4

in order to generate a watchable preview in Discord itself, the source video behind the URL needs to be less than 50MB (based on testing), so it'll use the projected length of the final clip to calculate a bitrate for ffmpeg to shoot for.