As it Turns Out, Video Processing Eats Your Disk Space

We made a lot of headway in our sprint to version 1.0 of Video Director, but we keep making tweaks as we go.

The arc of changes after we got the first video to auto record has more or less been iterations on the initial proof of concept, which was sound to begin with:

• After every commit of an app, run the creation of a trace file, the end to end demo broken down action by action with default narration as part of the Continuous Integration process. While everything still worked, it was a mistake to make this part of CI. The intentions were good - the result was not.

• Move trace file creation process, along with video and narration edits to a local machine - in my case, a MacBook Pro. Take it out of CI. This was a big improvement - no more chewing up GitHub CI minutes and paying for overages. This was mostly a big win. Let CI handle the software deployment and remove video processing from its list of tasks.

• We traded chewing up CI minutes for chewing up local disk space by storing trace files and rendered video files. I figured since there was no real CI cost anymore, we could trace and render as much as I wanted. In hindsight, I got a little over my skis there, as free disk space shrunk and shrunk.

• Now, trace files are still living locally, but they are being pushed out to Amazon S3, where storage costs next to nothing. We have a cleanup job that will purge local files as video versions become stale.

Next up is polishing up some AI skills so that video creation and edits become conversational experiences with Claude CoWork.

All in all, the project and app get stronger with every iteration.