Studio Setup

Two questions, two scripts. What can I use right now is the bundled scripts/doctor.py. How do I get the rest is video-studio setup. Answer both against the machine in front of you — describing an installed tool as missing wastes the user's time and makes everything else you say suspect.

Requires

scripts/doctor.py ships with this skill — stdlib-only, so the status report works the moment the skill is installed. It reads keys from .env in the current project, then ~/.config/video-studio/.env, then the shell.

setup.py does not ship here: it installs into the engine's own composer directory, so it is not a lone file. It needs pip install 'video-studio-engine @ https://github.com/scrollmark/social-skills/archive/refs/heads/master.tar.gz' and runs as video-studio setup. Without that install there is no install plan and no auto/system/manual classification — you keep doctor's report of what is reachable, but you lose the one thing that stops an agent from running a package-manager install nobody asked for, and you are back to fixing gaps by hand. references/tooling-inventory.md in this skill is the map; only doctor knows the state.

Checking an Environment

python3 scripts/doctor.py           # what is reachable right now
python3 scripts/doctor.py --json    # same, machine-readable

Doctor reports per category — public-domain archives, stock, generated video, generated images, generated audio, voice — plus the required binaries. It checks that a key is present, not that it works; a key can still be rejected at call time for spent quota or a withdrawn model, and the individual scripts report that.

To teach the workflow rather than describe it, video-studio tutor --list names the shipped tutorials; --step <name> <n> serves ONE step, and that is the design. A tutorial pasted whole is a document, not a lesson — nobody reads the middle and you cannot tell what landed. Serve a step, let them try it, ask whether it worked, then move. --show is for you to plan with, never to paste. Start with getting-started; it says up front which steps need a composer this repo does not ship.

Run it before offering sourcing options. Offering a source that turns out to have no key makes the estimate wrong as well as the offer.

Fixing a Broken One

video-studio setup                  # report + the exact plan, changes NOTHING
video-studio setup --yes            # actually run the runnable fixes
video-studio setup --yes --only composer,voice

Every missing component is classified, and the split is the whole point:

• auto — scoped to the toolchain directory, idempotent, safe to re-run: installing the composer's npm packages, warming the local voice model, copying .env.example to .env.
• system — changes the machine outside that directory, such as a package manager installing ffmpeg or node. Still runnable, but it is somebody's computer.
• manual — a human has to act: get an API key, enable billing, accept terms, restart a sandboxed host with network access. Never runnable. Printing "run this command" for something a machine cannot do erodes trust in the rest of the output.

Ask first, every time, even for the safe ones. Nothing runs without --yes, and --yes also runs the system-level installs. Tell the user what is missing in their terms ("the renderer isn't installed"), say whether you can fix it, then ask.

If everything is present, say nothing and get on with the work. Narrating a clean bill of health is noise.

The Tier-0 Floor

Three things, and without any one of them nothing works: ffmpeg + ffprobe (every duration measured, every trim, all loudness and keying), node 18+ (the composer renders and previews through it), and uv (runs every bundled script with its own pinned dependencies). Everything else widens what you can reach; these three decide whether there is a pipeline at all.

After that, the single highest-value addition is a free Pexels key. It converts "find me footage of that" from a coin flip into the normal answer, and costs nothing. Full inventory, tiers, costs and rights in references/tooling-inventory.md.

Licences

Every external service this skill can reach, with its cost and what you may do with the output, is in SERVICES.md next to this file. Check it before anything gets published. The music row is the one that actually bites: the free backend's redistribution rights are unclear, the paid one is licensed catalogue.

showwatcher Is Not Available, And Step 8 No Longer Waits For It

showwatcher is an internal analyzer that is not published anywhere — no package, no repository you can install from. video-studio setup lists it with no install command and doctor.py reports it missing, which is accurate; treat any instruction to "install it from its own repo" as stale.

Step 8 does not depend on it. The video-production skill ships a qc_render script of its own, which checks a render against the plan.json build_props wrote for it — duration, the plan's own consistency, a black tail, a frozen ending, resolution and fps. Pure stdlib over ffmpeg/ffprobe, so it needs no install at all.

What no bundled script can do is judge the picture: blur, caption overlap, off-palette colour and clipped text need decoded frames and models. So the gate is still two moves — run that script, then pull frames and look at them, and say out loud that you did. A hand check silently skipped is worse than no gate.

Anti-patterns

• Quoting the docs instead of the machine. The inventory is the map, not the state. Run doctor before saying a tool is available.
• Installing without asking. --yes touches the whole system. It is their computer, every time.
• Dressing up a manual step as a command. Nobody can brew install an API key or a billing account. Hand over the specific link.
• Treating a present key as a working key. Presence is all doctor can see. Quota, billing and withdrawn models fail at call time.
• Assuming the sandbox has network. Every stock lookup and generation call needs it; a host launched without it produces timeouts that look like provider outages.