Thoughts

UFO Pipeline Session 29 (2026-03-22): Phase 7 YouTube publishing core build complete. Built youtube-auth.mjs (OAuth2 for Brand Account), generate-thumbnails.mjs (Flux + sharp text overlay), youtube-publish.mjs (scheduled uploads with metadata and DB tracking), ffmpeg-reprocess.mjs (bakes thumbnail as first frame + 1s end hold). Discovered YouTube Shorts custom thumbnails via API are unreliable: API accepts upload without error but silently drops or reverts them. Studio UI also doesn't support custom Shorts thumbnails. Workaround: ffmpeg prepends thumbnail image as 0.5s first frame so YouTube auto-selects it. All 43 shorts reprocessed with baked thumbnails and uploaded to R2. Test uploaded 6 shorts, verified working, then deleted them to clean channel for launch. Channel name: Exo News Network. Launch date: April 1, 2026. Upload plan: 5/day over 9 sessions with character rotation for variety. Thumbnail design principle from Dave: follow real best practices, dynamic text placement, never cover faces, no rigid positioning rules. Remaining: upload all 43 in batches of 5, update Remotion to bake thumbnail frame natively for future batches.