HSID Shorts Engine

A daily devotional channel lives or dies on cadence. Producing one short by hand — script, scene art, narration, captions, upload — takes hours, and a schedule that depends on someone showing up every day eventually breaks.

Faith content adds a harder constraint: a doctrinal error isn't a typo, it's a breach of trust. The pipeline needed a verification gate as rigorous as the render itself.

A two-generation system. Era one was a nightly saint-of-the-day pipeline fired at 22:00 by Windows Task Scheduler (57 finished dailies). The current engine selects from a Needs × Moments content matrix and batch-builds a buffer of shorts — currently rendered 12 days ahead of the publish schedule.

Each short passes through a script grader, a theology verifier running a two-revision Reflexion loop on a separate model family, scene generation, a voice-cloned narration, word-synced burned captions, and a motion-upgrade finishing pass. Nothing publishes without human approval in a local review server — the publish gate enforces it.

Every generative stage runs on local GPUs: gemma4:26b writes and visually QCs, deepseek-r1:14b verifies theology, ComfyUI paints the scene, Qwen3-TTS narrates, faster-whisper times the captions. Zero cloud API calls in the render path. Publishing drives a real Chrome browser over the DevTools Protocol — two scheduled slots a day, timed to the US audience.