TakeCheck - video acceptance

takecheck

pytest for AI-generated video. Turn “is this take usable?” into an executable spec and a CI gate.

Status: v0.1.0 — published on PyPI. Spec compliance plus frozen / duplicate / blank / flicker / motion / subtitle residue / audio, with a self-contained HTML report.

Why

A 20-minute render should not be judged by scrubbing frames by hand. takecheck reads a takes.yml spec, compares the delivered file against it, and returns pass / fail + the reason — in seconds, on CPU, while the GPU is still rendering.

Generation pipelines fail in ways a thumbnail cannot show: a shot freezes for 300 ms, the camera starts flickering, the reference clip’s burned-in subtitles survive the redraw, the audio track silently disappears, the last frame of segment 3 does not match the first frame of segment 4. Each is cheap to detect and expensive to discover after a 20-minute render — or after stitching the whole film.

Existing tools do not cover this layer: VMAF/DOVER/DVQA score perceptual quality against a reference or a learned aesthetic prior, VideoGen-Eval is an LLM-API research harness, and ComfyUI QC nodes check tensors inside a graph instead of the delivered file.

Install

pip install takecheck

Requires ffmpeg / ffprobe on PATH. No PyTorch, no GPU — numpy is the only numeric dependency.

Quick start

takes.yml:

name: h3-ep12-shot03
expect:
  duration: 5.0
  fps: 24
  frames: 121
  resolution: 1280x720
  audio: required
  subtitles: forbidden
  frozen_max_ms: 200
  black_max_frames: 0
  flicker_max: 0.35
  motion_min: 0.002

takecheck check out/shot03.mp4 --spec takes.yml --json report.json --html report.html

FAIL  h3-ep12-shot03  (shot03.mp4)
  PASS  spec      1280x720 | 24fps | 121f | 5.04s
  FAIL  frozen    1 frozen stretch(es) over 200ms: 0.00-0.83s (longest 833ms)
  PASS  duplicate 0/120 frames replay an earlier frame (0.0%)
  PASS  blank     0 blank frame(s), luma 12-241
  PASS  flicker   worst 5-frame luma swing 9/255 (3.5% <= 35%)
  PASS  motion    mean frame-to-frame motion 0.0412 >= 0.0020
  PASS  subtitle  no persistent text band (row contrast 1.28 < 2 on 0% of frames)
  PASS  audio     peak -3.2 dB, -18.4 LUFS, 0% silent

Add --html report.html for a self-contained report: a contact sheet with failing moments outlined in red, every measured value, and the raw JSON inline. No external assets, so it can be emailed or attached to a PR as a single file.

Exit codes: 0 pass, 1 fail, 2 bad spec / unreadable file.

What the checks measure

Every check reports the numbers behind its verdict in --json and --html, not just PASS/FAIL.

| Check | Signal | Fails when | |---|---|---| | frozen | pHash Hamming distance between consecutive frames | ≤ 3 for longer than frozen_max_ms | | duplicate | repeated frame hashes, ignoring neighbours, blanks and freezes | more than 1% of frames replay an earlier one | | blank | mean luma per frame | below 16 or above 240, more than black_max_frames | | flicker | peak-to-peak luma inside a 5-frame window | above flicker_max (fraction of 0–255) | | motion | mean absolute frame-to-frame difference | below motion_min | | subtitle | busiest row's horizontal activity ÷ that band's median row | above 2.0 on ≥ 30% of frames, when subtitles: forbidden | | audio | peak dBFS, EBU R128 loudness, silent fraction | peak ≥ −0.1 dBFS, or more than 60% silent |

Three design choices worth knowing:

• One defect, one check. A cut to black is reported by blank only; duplicate skips blank frames, and flicker skips windows containing them. A freeze is reported by frozen, and duplicate ignores frames a freeze already explains. A missing audio track is reported by the spec check, so audio stays quiet about it instead of failing twice for one problem.
• motion is exempt on purpose. It is a whole-clip aggregate ("does this clip move at all"), not an event with a timestamp, so it may legitimately co-fire with a local check: a fully black clip really is both blank and motionless.
• Thresholds are calibrated, not guessed. motion_min defaults to 0.002 because a normally moving clip measures ≈ 0.009 and a still render ≈ 0.000 on the bundled fixtures. Real footage differs — set the values in takes.yml for your own pipeline.
• Deliberately slow shots read as still. A clip slowed down 8x measures mean_motion ≈ 0.0010 and will fail the default motion_min of 0.002. If your pipeline uses slow motion or static compositions on purpose, lower motion_min (or set it to 0) in takes.yml.

Known limitations

• The subtitle check has only been validated on synthetic footage. Its fixtures use a hard white bar on black. Real subtitle ghosts are semi-transparent and blurred, and a scene that legitimately contains text in the lower third will trip the check. Treat the default threshold as a starting point, not a calibrated value.
• Loudness is reported, not enforced. Only clipping and excessive silence fail the audio check; a quiet or hot mix is recorded under measured for you to judge.
• Long clips are untested. Decoding is streamed, so memory should stay flat, but a 20-minute render has not been benchmarked.

Roadmap

• [x] v0.0.1 — spec format, ffprobe compliance check, CLI, takecheck selftest
• [x] v0.1.0 — frozen / duplicate / blank / flicker / motion / subtitle / audio, HTML report, on PyPI
• [x] ComfyUI node — drop it after a sampler, branch on pass
• [ ] v0.2.0 — calibration against accepted/rejected takes, head/tail continuity
• [ ] v0.3.0 — pipeline lint (custom-node provenance, model hash pinning)
• [ ] v0.4.0 — pluggable VLM judge

ComfyUI

comfyui/ holds a node that runs these checks on the IMAGE batch you just generated. It reuses this package — no check logic is duplicated — and runs on the CPU while your GPU keeps sampling.

cmd /c mklink /J "<ComfyUI>\custom_nodes\ComfyUI-TakeCheck" "<repo>\comfyui"
"<ComfyUI>/../python/python.exe" -m pip install takecheck

Restart ComfyUI; the node appears under video/validation → TakeCheck. Outputs are pass (BOOLEAN), verdict, report (path) and detail (the failing checks in one line). See comfyui/README.md for the spec options, and run python comfyui/TakeCheck.py to self-test without ComfyUI.

Two things to know about the node:

• flicker is less sensitive there than in the CLI. ComfyUI hands over IMAGE as clamped RGB, so a take whose brightness was pushed past 0/255 in YUV arrives with the swing already squashed. A real exposure flicker is still caught; run the CLI on the saved file if you depend on this check.
• A malformed spec raises an error rather than returning "fail", so you can tell a broken config from a bad take.

Test media

testmedia/synthetic/ holds seven tiny clips that each reproduce exactly one defect — frozen frames, duplicate frames, blank frames, flicker, missing audio, burned-in subtitles — plus good.mp4 as the control that must always pass. Rebuild them with:

python scripts/make_testmedia.py

The script also verifies each clip against its expected profile (duration, frame count, audio) and runs in CI, so the fixtures cannot silently rot. A second script asserts the verdict for each one:

python scripts/check_synthetic.py

It fails if good.mp4 trips any check, or if a defect clip stops being caught — so a threshold change cannot quietly break detection.

Real footage never goes in the repository: testmedia/real/ is git-ignored.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q
takecheck selftest            # builds synthetic clips in a temp dir; needs ffmpeg
python scripts/check_synthetic.py

Note for contributors on Windows: drawtext needs an explicit fontfile=, otherwise ffmpeg aborts with a Fontconfig error instead of drawing anything. The test helpers search a list of common font paths for this reason.

中文简介

takecheck 是给 AI 生成视频用的验收层：用 takes.yml 声明一条片子该满足什么（时长、帧率、 无静帧、无字幕残影、音轨完整），一条命令返回通过与否和原因，可直接当 CI 门禁。 全程 CPU、秒级，能与渲染并行，不占显存。

License

MIT.