Automating Clip Production With an API
If you are producing clips at volume, the bottleneck stops being editing and becomes coordination. Here is what to automate, and what to leave to a person.
At a few clips a week, doing it by hand is fine. At a few hundred, the editing is no longer the slow part. The slow part is somebody remembering to start the job, noticing it finished, moving the file, and telling the next person. That is coordination, and it is exactly what an API is for.
The shape of an automated pipeline
- Something new appears: an upload lands, a recording finishes, a feed updates.
- Your code submits the source to a clipping job and stores the job id.
- The job runs. This takes minutes, not milliseconds, so nothing should sit and wait on it.
- A webhook fires when the job completes or fails.
- Your handler fetches the clips and pushes them wherever they need to go.
Poll only if you have to
Polling a status endpoint every few seconds works and is easy to write, and it is also the thing that will eventually get you rate limited. A webhook inverts it: nothing runs until there is something to react to. Keep a slow poll as a safety net for jobs you never heard back about, not as the primary path.
A public webhook endpoint will be found and it will be probed. A signed payload lets you prove a request actually came from the service before you act on it. Reject anything that does not verify, and do it before you parse the body.
Make the handler idempotent
Webhooks get retried. Networks time out after the work has already happened, and a delivery you handled successfully can arrive again. If your handler posts to social media, a duplicate delivery is a duplicate post. Key the work on the job id and make a second delivery a no-op.
What not to automate
Publishing without a human ever looking. Automated selection is good at finding candidate moments and bad at knowing that today is the wrong day to post that particular joke. The pattern that holds up is automating everything through to a review queue, then having a person approve. You keep the throughput and you keep the judgement.
The other thing worth leaving alone is retry logic that reruns a whole job on any failure. Failures have different causes, and a source that cannot be fetched will fail identically every time you try it.
SpikeReel has a REST API for creating clip jobs, checking status, and publishing or scheduling the results, with signed webhooks on completion and failure. The reference lives at /docs/api.
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