Clone Reel

What it does

Clone Reel takes a link to a reel and builds a project with the same structure: every shot as a named placeholder in order, placeholders for the music and voiceover, and every on-screen text at its time in a matching favorite. The original rides along on a Reference track so you can match your footage against it.

Before you start

• A workspace must be open.
• The download helper yt-dlp must be installed, with ffmpeg for reels that arrive in a codec the Mac cannot play. Install both with brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg. The app looks in the usual Homebrew places and on your login shell's PATH; it never installs anything itself.
• You must be signed in. Cloning spends credits. See Account.

Settings › AI shows where yt-dlp and ffmpeg were found. See Settings.

Clone a reel

1. Choose File › Clone Reel… (⇧⌘N), or click Clone Reel… in the workspace window.
2. Paste the link. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts work, as does anything else yt-dlp knows. If a link is already on the clipboard the window offers it with one click.
3. Click Clone Reel.

The window shows four steps: Fetching the reel, Watching it, Planning the video, Building the project. It takes a minute or two. Cancel stops it. After a failure the button reads Try Again.

Only one reel is cloned at a time. On the command line, reel-clone <url> [name] does the same.

What you get

• A project named after the reel. A landscape reel makes a landscape project.
• The reel's shots as named placeholders on the video track, in order. See Placeholders.
• Placeholders for the music and the voiceover on audio tracks.
• The on-screen text the reel actually showed, as text clips wearing a matching favorite. Text the drafting step invents is dropped, and burnt-in captions are noted rather than copied.
• A Reference video track at the top with the whole reel at 50% opacity and 50% level, over the placeholders. Hide or delete it when you are done.
• When nobody speaks in the reel, its sound is extracted to reference-audio.m4a and laid on the audio track as the music, with the Reference track muted.

The project folder keeps reference.mp4, reel.json (the analysis: shots, texts, sound, transcript) and template.json. Import Template… can start another project from that file.

Credits

A clone costs a flat amount plus an amount per started minute of the reel. The rate is listed in Settings › Account. A big job asks first; if the balance is too low the clone fails with an alert that offers Buy Credits.

Private posts

Public posts need no login. For a post that needs one, choose a browser under Log in with in Settings › AI; yt-dlp then reads that browser's cookies. Chrome and Firefox work. Safari needs Full Disk Access for the app.