render-creator-pip-listicle

Assemble a creator picture-in-picture product listicle ad from a config: an AI creator counts down N products in the brand's own voice, and the creator stays FULL-FRAME the whole time — there is NO cut to a full-frame product shot, ever. On each product beat, three persistent overlays ride on top of the full-frame creator for the WHOLE beat: (1) a title pill top-center (persistent, it carries the listicle title), (2) the DEMO in a rounded PiP window top-right — the brand's real UGC clip (MUTED), or for a no-UGC brand the product's own demo (a real screen-recording, or an autocropped high-res product-UI/dashboard still sized to fill the window), and (3) a product card pinned bottom (rounded thumbnail left + "N · CATEGORY" small-caps + product NAME in a serif face like Georgia). Hook + CTA beats are the creator full-frame with the title pill only (no PiP/card). The creator's voice + lips are generated together, natively per beat — there is no separate voiceover. This capability is the FREE, deterministic assembly — build the per-beat overlay PNG, cover-scale the creator clip + composite the overlay, concat all beats, and burn the captions.

Choices

The creative calls are the user's, asked by the format recipe before any paid step; this assembly renders whatever the config holds.

• creator — who counts down the list (gender, age, look, wardrobe) → creator.descriptor. The demo used a home-cook creator in his thirties.
• setting — where the creator films → creator.setting / the anchor prompt. The demo used a home kitchen counter.
• tone — bubbly, calm and honest, dry and funny, or fast expert → beats[].dialogue. The demo was chatty and enthusiastic.

scripts/config.example.json is the worked example (Pantrywise Kitchen "5 tools that replaced my whole utensil drawer", ~46s 1080×1920 9:16, a hook + 5 product beats + a CTA) — 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.

Run

This is the FREE, deterministic assembly stage — it spends nothing beyond the caption burn. The paid inputs are separate capabilities — the creator anchor (create-image-fal, Seedream v5 Pro, model bytedance/seedream/v5/pro/text-to-image with no fal-ai/ prefix) and one native Seedance talking clip per beat (create-video-fal, model bytedance/seedance-2.0/reference-to-video, generate_audio=ON, the SAME seed across beats so the face holds, 720p default). Given those native clips + the brand's real UGC demo clips (or the product's own autocropped UI stills / screen recordings) + the real product photos + the brand palette + the title copy, render-creator-pip-listicle builds ONE full-1080×1920 transparent overlay PNG per beat (title pill always; + demo PiP top-right + bottom product card + rank number on product beats), cover-scales the creator clip to 1080×1920 and overlays the beat's overlay PNG for the whole beat while keeping the native audio, concats all beats, and burns the captions last → the master. Re-cuts reuse the existing native clips + overlays and spend nothing.

Anchor gotcha (Seedream v5 Pro, not gpt-image-2/Seedream-v4). Seedance 2.0's partner-validation gate REJECTS photoreal faces from gpt-image-2 AND Seedream v4 ("may contain likenesses of real people"); a Seedream v5 Pro face passes. Generate a FRESH anchor with create-image-fal, model bytedance/seedream/v5/pro/text-to-image (no fal-ai/ prefix) — reusing an existing photoreal face from another project also trips the gate.

Clip gotchas (Seedance 2.0). A REJECTED submit STILL bills via the fal-proxy — pre-flight ONE test clip (the hook) and confirm it renders before firing the batch. Presigned anchor URLs expire ~1h → re-host the anchor if a batch runs long (else "Failed to download the file" mid-batch). The intermittent fal "User is locked: Exhausted balance" is the proxy's upstream fal account (not your GooseWorks credits) → retry with backoff.

Contract (the free assembly)

• Creator FULL-FRAME the whole beat — NO cut to a full-frame product shot. Every beat is ONE continuous full-frame creator clip; the product content lives in overlays, never in a full-frame cutaway. per_beat_shots = 1.
• Native creator audio carries the reel — no separate VO. Each beat's voice + lips come from ONE Seedance take (generate_audio=ON); this stage never adds a VO or a lip-sync pass. The creator clip's native audio plays continuous across the whole beat; the demo PiP's audio is muted (else the voice doubles).
• Three persistent overlays on each product beat. For the WHOLE beat, on top of the full-frame creator: (a) the title pill top-center (persistent, title_pill.on=true — carries the listicle title, kept short to fit one line); (b) the DEMO PiP top-right; (c) the product card bottom. Hook + CTA carry the title pill only.
• The DEMO PiP is autocropped to FILL its window. It's the brand's REAL UGC clip (MUTED, never AI-regenerated) — OR, for a brand with NO UGC (B2B/SaaS), the product's own demo: a real screen-recording, or an AUTOCROPPED high-res product-UI/dashboard still. Autocrop the still (trim transparent/near-white margins) and size the PiP window to the cropped content's aspect ratio so it fills the window — no letterbox whitespace; a WIDE screenshot → a SHORT + WIDE window, a tall/square one → a taller window. Rounded window, white hairline border, soft drop shadow, top-right. Disclose in the review when the demo is a still/mockup rather than a real UGC clip.
• Products are REAL photos — never AI-render the product. The bottom product card (rounded thumbnail + "N · CATEGORY" small-caps + product NAME in a serif face like Georgia) comes from the brand's real product photo / UI thumbnail; a product with no clean photo falls back to a brand-color tile with the wordmark, never an AI product render.
• Persistent title pill, rank number on the card. The title pill is persistent top-center (this format's identity, on by default). A counting rank number (1..N) is rendered on the product card on product beats.
• Captions burned LAST as PIL PNG overlays, brand-accent, deterministic. This ffmpeg has no libass → render each ~2-word cue as a timed PIL PNG overlay (overlay=…:enable='between(t,s,e)'): white words + a brand-accent underline, black stroke for legibility, positioned CLEAR of the PiP (top) and the card (bottom) (mid-to-lower band). Time them DETERMINISTICALLY from the known per-beat script — the fal-ai/whisper proxy is unreliable (900s timeouts); do NOT depend on it. The known script is the brand-correct source, so brand tokens are always spelled right.
• FFmpeg composite, deterministic, FREE. Per beat: build ONE full-1080×1920 transparent overlay PNG (title pill; + PiP + card + rank number on product beats), cover-scale the creator clip to 1080×1920, overlay the PNG for the whole beat, keep the native audio. Concat all beats with the concat demuxer @ 30fps / yuv420p → a 1080×1920 h264+aac master, then burn captions last. Probe durations with ffprobe -of csv=p=0 (NOT -of default=nk=1:np=1, which errors on some builds). No paid calls in the composite/stitch, no keys.