Media Acquisition

One shot, one source, decided by a rule rather than by which vendor sounds impressive. Apply it per shot, never per project — a single video routinely mixes all four tiers.

Requires

scripts/prekey.py (keying a generated clip to alpha) ships with this skill — stdlib-only, wants ffmpeg on PATH.

Everything that actually fetches needs pip install 'video-studio-engine @ https://github.com/scrollmark/social-skills/archive/refs/heads/master.tar.gz', invoked as video-studio <name> …. The base install covers stock_archive, stock_pexels, stock_pixabay, stock_shutterstock, gen_image, gen_minimax, gen_replicate and verify_clips (the return check). Add [sourcing] for source_clips (user URLs and licence-filtered search, needs yt-dlp) and [generate] for gen_veo; the bracket takes both at once, [sourcing,generate].

Skip that install and this skill is not usable as a workflow. It is a selection rule wrapped around ten programs; the ladder still reads as a briefing that tells a human which library to open and why, but nothing searches, nothing generates, nothing checks what arrived, and the licence filtering that makes the tiers safe is inside those programs, not in this prose.

The Ladder