Refine

The first render is a strong draft. Refinement is a loop of watching and saying what you saw — in plain language, to your agent.

Watch a review copy

open-take render demos/myapp.mp4 --review

Renders a fast draft to review.mp4 with beat badges burned in — the video itself teaches what "beat 3" refers to — plus a REVIEW watermark. It never overwrites the postable master.

Give notes

Notes are one line each, aimed at a beat or the whole take:

beat 3: no zoom
tighter on beat 2
look: slate

Your agent edits composition.json and re-renders from the kept capture — a fix is a re-render, never a re-shoot. That matters when the take involved a real deploy you can't repeat.

open-take beats <take> prints the numbered beat sheet (the shared map those notes refer to); --card appends a say-it cheat card.

Answer taste questions by eye

open-take ab demos/myapp.mp4 --set zoom=light,tight --beat 3

One knob, up to three candidate values, rendered as a labeled reel — each variant plays twice, and variant A is always the take you kept. Knobs:

Reels are windowed to the beat's zoom arc by default (--full for the whole take). --before-after replays prev.mp4 vs the current master instead — no render, BEFORE then AFTER, twice.

Check framing without rendering

open-take frames demos/myapp.mp4

Extracts a beat-aware contact sheet (frames.png) from the delivered mp4 in seconds — an intro row, one row per beat sampled across the camera hold, a tail row. Judge framing on hold cells, never mid-ramp. --beat N densifies one beat into a 10-cell strip with per-cell phase labels.

Keep the old one

Every render (and every editor Export) stages the master it replaces as prev.mp4, so "keep the old one" is a mechanical revert — and ab --before-after is how you compare the two by eye.