Cutaway NAS Media Curator

Zero-Cloud AI Video Indexing, Scene Tagging & Short-Form Storyboard Skill for UGREEN AI NAS — turns raw NAS footage into editable Premiere & FCPXML timelines.

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Inspiration

Independent video creators, design studios, and agencies shoot far more than they publish. Drone passes, street B-roll, architectural time-lapses, and raw 4K footage pile up on local NAS drives as anonymous files (DJI_0412.MP4, C0089.MOV). When a vertical Short or Reel is due tomorrow, nobody has time to manually scrub forty hours of raw footage—so the best shots sit unused. Meanwhile, cloud AI video editors force creators to upload terabytes of unreleased client footage over residential uplinks, creating massive bandwidth bottlenecks and privacy risks.

What it does

Cutaway NAS Media Curator is a 100% local-first AI Agent Skill built for UGREEN AI NAS (UGOS Pro) that turns a plain-language creative brief into an editable, frame-accurate NLE timeline without a single byte of source footage ever leaving the NAS:

"Create a 30-second 9:16 vertical reel: harbour at dawn, fishing boats, seagulls."

  1. Incremental Multimodal Indexing (indexer.py): Scans authorized NAS media shares (/volume1/footage), extracting ffprobe video/audio stream specs, folder/filename semantics, sidecar transcripts (.srt / .vtt), perceptual dHashes for near-duplicate removal, and vector embeddings into a single portable SQLite FTS5 catalog right beside the footage.
  2. Hybrid Semantic + Keyword Retrieval: Blends exact BM25 keyword ranking with semantic vector similarity so natural queries match visual concepts and time-of-day cues.
  3. Frame-Accurate Scene & Cut Detection (scene_detector.py): Runs FFmpeg scene-change detection (select='gt(scene,T)') locally on the NAS to split long takes into discrete shots with cut-confidence scores, minimum-length merging, and cutaway suitability scoring.
  4. Hook → Body → Outro Storyboard Engine (xml_exporter.py): Automatically sequences the highest-scoring visual hook within the first 2.0 seconds, enforces source diversity (never repeating the same source clip back-to-back), and trims shots to hit the exact target frame count.
  5. Multi-NLE Timeline & Storyboard Export: Outputs Adobe Premiere Pro XML (FCP7 XML) with automatic 16:9 → 9:16 vertical fill-scaling, Final Cut Pro / DaVinci Resolve FCPXML 1.10, a Markdown Storyboard with extracted JPEG keyframes, and SRT captions—automatically rewriting NAS mount paths (/volume1/footage → /Volumes/footage or Z:\footage) so editors open the timeline over SMB with instant media relinking.

How we built it

  • UGOS Pro & Uliya Skill Architecture: Designed around the universal SKILL.md specification with deterministic CLI orchestration (curator.py), strict read-only media safety rules, and NAS system-folder exclusions (@eaDir, #recycle, .@__thumb).
  • Zero-Cloud Python + FFmpeg Pipeline: Built with Python 3.10+, SQLite3 FTS5, and FFmpeg 5+ so it runs out-of-the-box on UGREEN AI NAS via SSH or Docker, with optional on-device CLIP embeddings (open_clip_torch) accelerated by UGREEN AI NAS iDX6011 Pro hardware.
  • 30 Automated End-to-End Tests: Verified with a 30-test pytest suite that synthesizes multi-scene test videos via FFmpeg, indexes them into SQLite, detects scene boundaries, and validates both FCPXML 1.10 and Premiere FCP7 XML schemas.

Challenges we ran into

  • Cross-Platform NLE Path Relinking: NAS paths (/volume1/...) differ from macOS SMB mounts (/Volumes/...) and Windows mapped drives. We implemented deterministic path-prefix mapping (--map) inside both the FCPXML and FCP7 XML generators so timelines relink immediately upon import.
  • 16:9 Horizontal Archive to 9:16 Vertical Shorts: Most NAS archives are shot in 16:9 4K, whereas Shorts/Reels require 9:16 vertical framing. We engineered automatic center-crop scale metadata inside the exported XML timelines so clips fill the 1080×1920 frame non-destructively—the editor can still re-pan any shot in Premiere or Resolve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • AI Drafts, Human Finishes: Unlike black-box "AI clipping" web apps that burn a low-bitrate MP4 and lock the editor out, Cutaway NAS Media Curator outputs native, frame-accurate XML timelines that fit directly into professional workflows.
  • 100% Data Sovereignty: Unreleased client shoots and private family archives remain strictly on the user's UGREEN NAS RAID volume.

What's next for Cutaway NAS Media Curator (Round 2 on UGREEN AI NAS iDX6011 Pro)

  • Benchmark local CLIP & Whisper indexing throughput on UGREEN AI NAS iDX6011 Pro NPU/GPU across 100GB+ 4K H.264/HEVC libraries.
  • Integrate native UGOS file-ingest event hooks and a lightweight mobile preview card inside UGREEN Skills Hub.

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