How my Mac edits our photo studio's reels every night

One reel it made got about 100,000 views on TikTok. No human touched the edit. This page is an overview of the loop, not our code.

The guide · 7 parts

1. 01

   The whole loop

   Raw clips and finished photos go into one shared folder. A scheduled job on a Mac runs this every night at midnight:

   

2. 02

   1. Find the flash

   Our photographers shoot behind-the-scenes clips while they fire a flash. FFmpeg measures the average brightness of every frame. When one frame is suddenly much brighter than the frames around it, that is the flash: the moment the photo was taken.

   The script cuts a short window around that spike (about a second and a half), with the flash a little past the middle, so every clip lands on the click of the shutter.

   

3. 03

   2. Let Claude score one frame

   A picture of each new clip goes to Claude with three questions, each scored 0 to 10: does the background look like Tokyo, is the client clearly visible and smiling, and can you see the photographer, camera or flash. The scores are saved, so each clip is only scored once.

   

4. 04

   3. Pick with weights, not at random

   • Clips with a flash and higher scores are drawn more often.
   • Anything used in the last few reels is pushed almost to zero, so the feed doesn't repeat itself.
   • A combination that overlaps too much with an earlier reel is drawn again.
5. 05

   4. Cut on your own timing

   This is the part that made it look right. Before writing any code, I edited a few reels by hand in CapCut. They kept the same rhythm, so I measured the cut points and copied them exactly, down to the hundredth of a second. Every reel the machine makes uses that rhythm: 3 clips, 5 finished photos, 1 hook line, about 10 seconds.

   

6. 06

   5. Post the top three

   Every night it makes 10 reels, checks that each file plays, and schedules the 3 with the best scores to TikTok at spread-out times, each with a caption from a rotating set.

7. 07

   Build your own

   • Edit by hand first. Automate the pattern you already have, not one you imagine.
   • Let numbers decide where to cut (the flash) and let the model decide what is good (the scores).
   • Keep a record of what each reel used, so the next night can avoid it.
   • Start with posting a few a day. More is not better on a new account.

Good to know

• Results vary: most reels get far fewer views than the best one.
• An overview by @copilot_shogo. Not affiliated with any of the tools above.