ai-news-video

AI News Video — Automated Weekly Digest Production

A deterministic pipeline that turns live web research into a finished, broadcast-quality news video. Built for unattended/scheduled execution: every step either produces an artifact or fails loudly.

Core Principle

Research is non-deterministic; everything after it is deterministic. Research quality is the only variable, so it gets the strictest gate (news_fetch.py) plus editorial judgment. Once news.json is validated, the render is fully scripted and reproducible.

Never skip the validation gate. A news video showing a fabricated or stale headline is worse than no video at all — it destroys the channel's credibility.

Pipeline

RESEARCH → VALIDATE → SCAFFOLD → RENDER → VERIFY → DELIVER
   (agent)   (script)    (script)    (script)   (script)  (agent)

Run steps in order. Do not skip VERIFY — a render can exit 0 and still have the wrong duration.

---

Step 1 — Research (agent, web tools)

Goal: 3–8 candidate stories, each with a real URL, publisher, and exact date.

1. Compute the window at run time — never hardcode dates:

   python3 scripts/news_fetch.py window --days 7
   # {"start": "2026-10-06", "end": "2026-10-12", "days": 7}
   

2. Run 3–5 parallel WebSearch calls covering different angles so results aren't drawn from a single editorial perspective:
   • AI news <Month Year> / artificial intelligence news week <dates>
   • <major lab> announcement (OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, xAI)
   • AI funding valuation round / AI regulation policy
   • a region-appropriate sweep (e.g. 人工智能 新闻 本周)
3. Confirm the promising results with WebFetch: exact date, exact figures, publisher name. Search snippets alone are insufficient — dates and numbers get garbled in aggregation pages.
4. Rank and cut to the final set. Aim for 5 items across diverse categories (model / funding / policy / product / market). Prefer primary sources (vendor blogs, filings) for specs and pricing.

Read references/editorial-standards.md for source tiering, ranking, and the anti-fabrication rules. Apply them while selecting, not afterward.

Step 2 — Author the draft JSON

Write draft.json per the schema below — the validator is strict by design.

{
  "meta": {
    "week_range": "2026.10.06 — 2026.10.12",
    "window": { "start": "2026-10-06", "end": "2026-10-12" }
  },
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "Anthropic 获 **600 亿美元** 芯片融资，华尔街银团豪赌算力",
      "summary": "银行团分销债务融资，资助其租用谷歌 TPU 的 2027 年芯片订单。",
      "emoji": "🚀",
      "keywords": ["600 亿美元"],
      "url": "https://www.chinanews.com/…",
      "publisher": "中国新闻网 / Financial Times",
      "date": "2026-10-06",
      "source_tier": "通讯社/主流媒体"
    }
  ]
}

Headline rules: wrap 1–3 keywords in **double asterisks**; keep visual width ≤ 92 CJK units; lead with the subject, land on the number or entity. Emoji must be semantically tied to the topic. See references/editorial-standards.md §4.

Step 3 — Validate (script — hard gate)

python3 scripts/news_fetch.py validate draft.json -o content/news.json --verify-urls

Rejects: missing URL/publisher, out-of-window dates, empty summaries, oversized headlines, duplicate stories, unusable emoji. Fix every error and re-run. --verify-urls performs a live HTTP check (skips gracefully when offline).

Print a QC report and keep it for the final message:

python3 scripts/news_fetch.py report content/news.json

Step 4 — Scaffold (script)

./scripts/setup_project.sh ./remotion-videos

Copies the Remotion template (idempotent; never clobbers existing src/) and installs dependencies only when missing. Use USE_NP_MIRROR=1 on slow networks.

Then place the validated file at remotion-videos/src/content/news.json.

Step 5 — Render (script)

./scripts/render.sh ./remotion-videos src/index.ts ai-weekly output/ai-weekly.mp4

Always use this script. It sets NODE_OPTIONS="" and CODEBUDDY_BROKERED_FS_HOOK_ENABLED=false to work around a filesystem-brokering shim that otherwise makes Remotion's bundler fail with EEXIST ... mkdir (see references/troubleshooting.md §1). Running npx remotion directly will fail.

Step 6 — Verify (script, inside render.sh)

render.sh runs ffprobe and exits non-zero on any mismatch against 1920x1080 and the expected duration. Confirm manually if needed:

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 \
  -show_entries stream=width,height,r_frame_rate,duration,nb_frames \
  -of default=noprint_wrappers=1 output/ai-weekly.mp4

Expected: width=1920 height=1080 r_frame_rate=30/1 duration=20.000000.

Step 7 — Deliver (agent)

Call present_files with the MP4 path. In the reply include:

• verified specs (resolution / fps / duration / size) from ffprobe,
• the headlines with publisher + date (so every claim is checkable),
• the source tiering note,
• any deviation from the brief.

---

Expected Output

• Duration: 20.0s exactly @ 30fps (600 frames)
• Resolution: 1920×1080
• Structure: 2s intro → 5 × 3s news cards → outro CTA (absorbs the remainder)
• Visual: dark gradient ground, white headlines, #00D4FF keyword accents, vertical timeline whose node ignites as each story arrives

Customization

Change	Edit
Colors, fonts, spacing, motion	theme.ts — the only file to touch for re-skins
Frame budget / durations	COMP in theme.ts (outro auto-rebalances)
Item count	Add/remove entries in news.json (3–8)
New scene type	New file in src/compositions/, composed from theme tokens
Aspect ratio (9:16, 1:1)	COMP.width/height + re-derive LAYOUT in theme.ts

Never hardcode a hex value or pixel magic number inside a scene — that defeats the theme and is the main cause of visual drift between variants.

Bundled Resources

• scripts/news_fetch.py — window computation, validation gate, QC report
• scripts/setup_project.sh — idempotent project scaffolding + deps
• scripts/render.sh — shim-safe render + ffprobe verification
• assets/project-template/ — full Remotion project (theme, scenes, components)
• references/editorial-standards.md — sourcing, ranking, headline craft
• references/visual-design.md — color, type, layout, motion rationale
• references/troubleshooting.md — the nine real failure modes and fixes

Hard Rules

1. Never fabricate a URL, date, figure, or publisher.
2. Never hardcode a date window — compute it per run.
3. Never bypass news_fetch.py validate.
4. Never render without render.sh (the shim workaround is mandatory).
5. Never report success without ffprobe confirmation.
6. Never put raw colors/sizes in a scene file — use theme.ts.