Clippie – AI Short-Form Video Generator

Overview

Clippie is a desktop application that automatically transforms long-form videos into viral short-form clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts — powered by AI.

What it does

• AI Moment Detection – Uses OpenAI Whisper to transcribe videos and a custom viral scoring algorithm to identify the most engaging moments automatically
• Smart Cropping – MediaPipe-based face detection keeps subjects centred in 9:16 output
• Styled Subtitles – CapCut-style word-by-word highlighting or fast ASS-based subtitles via FFmpeg
• B-Roll Injection – Automatically pulls relevant stock footage from Pexels/Pixabay and overlays it
• Audio Enhancement – EBU R128 loudness normalisation, noise suppression, and audio ducking
• Silence Removal – Jump-cut engine based on Whisper word timestamps
• Batch Queue – Process multiple videos in the background with a thread-safe render queue
• AI Copywriter – OpenAI-powered caption and hashtag generation per content category
• YouTube Downloader – Built-in yt-dlp integration to import videos directly from YouTube

Architecture

Built around a single source of truth (AppState) with two render pipelines: a fast FFmpeg + ASS pipeline and a frame-by-frame CapCut-style renderer using Pillow and OpenCV. The app is fully modular with 40+ extracted components, a CI/CD pipeline, and a pytest test suite.