Thoughts

We decided to scrap those 43 YouTube shorts when we rebranded. They can be taken off of the action list

Tomorrow we need to remove the baked in captions from the YouTube longform videos on the UFO pipeline project. They shouldn't be baked into the long form videos they should be added separately during the upload as an SRT file or something like that. We also need to come up with some type of a graphic for the long forms that sits in the corner to cover the VO watermark and the notebook LM watermark when it occasionally is going to pop up. also set up the symlink between mac mini and laptop for .claude folder with global rules and memory files

Tomorrow we need to remove the baked in captions from the YouTube longform videos on the UFO pipeline project. They shouldn't be baked into the long form videos they should be added separately during the upload as an SRT file or something like that. We also need to come up with some type of a graphic for the long forms that sits in the corner to cover the VO watermark and the notebook LM watermark when it occasionally is going to pop up. Also, we need to set rules for the long form, contents transcripts to get turned into blog posts and uploaded into the database

Tomorrow we need to remove the baked in captions from the YouTube longform videos on the UFO pipeline project. They shouldn't be baked into the long form videos they should be added separately during the upload as an SRT file or something like that. We also need to come up with some type of a graphic for the long forms that sits in the corner to cover the VO watermark and the notebook LM watermark when it occasionally is going to pop up.

UFO UAP RV YT Pipeline - Phase 7 Session (2026-03-21): YouTube publishing infrastructure built. Channel name changed from "Project Veilgate" to "Exo News Network". Domain secured for future merch. Banner already generated in Gemini (all 4 characters in suits at a news desk, news studio backdrop, Roswell PIP, ticker). Built three scripts in pipeline/scripts/: 1. youtube-auth.mjs - OAuth2 flow for YouTube Data API v3. Creates desktop app consent flow, saves refresh token to pipeline/config/oauth-token.json. One-time run. 2. generate-thumbnails.mjs - Generates 1080x1920 thumbnails per short using Flux via fal.ai (character close-up or scene from visual plan) with text overlay via sharp. Uploads to R2 at {short_id}/thumbnail.jpg. 3. youtube-publish.mjs - Pulls rendered videos from R2, uploads to YouTube with metadata (title, description, tags, category 28, thumbnail). Sets privacyStatus "private" with publishAt timestamp. 5 uploads per session (new channel safe limit). Resumes automatically (skips already-published shorts by checking shorts.youtube_video_id in Postgres). Updates shorts table with youtube_video_id and scheduled_publish_at. Upload plan: 5/day over ~9 sessions. First short airs April 1st 2026, one per day after that. All uploaded as private with publishAt, Dave reviews in YouTube Studio before go-live. Phase 7 task list (7.1-7.8): GCP project setup, OAuth flow, thumbnail generator, publish script, metadata generator, test upload, first batch of 5, remaining 38 in batches of 5. Dependencies installed: googleapis, google-auth-library, sharp, open. OAuth config files added to .gitignore. CLAUDE.md updated with Phase 7 docs (How to Run sections for auth, thumbnails, publishing). Still needed next session: Create GCP project "exo-news-network", enable YouTube Data API v3, create OAuth credentials, run consent flow, dry-run publish, generate thumbnails, test upload 1 short as private. No git commits yet this session (nothing verified/tested yet).

UFO UAP YT Pipeline Session 27: Re-rendered 42/43 shorts with updated captions (Caption.tsx rewrite with 5 styles, timing/spacing fixes). Deployed to Railway, ran all 4 batches with --force. Results: a1 17/17, a2 8/8, b1 9/9, b2 8/9. Total: 42/43 succeeded, ~1.75GB in R2, ~52.5 min render time. 1 failure: "The Maid and the Beings of Light" (8f127e42) consistently crashes Railway with OOM when loading a Flux still via Remotion's Img component. Railway sent OOM email during session. Need to either render that one locally, increase Railway memory, or investigate the asset. Ready for Phase 7 (YouTube publishing) after resolving the 1 failed short.