Pipeline & Funnel: a video's path from script to YouTube

What the pipeline is

Mutant turns a ready script into a published YouTube video through a chain of stages. Each stage does one job and hands the result to the next. The order is always the same:

Script → SEO → Voiceover → Video prompts → Video generation → Render → Publish to YouTube

Each stage is its own job queue. A video can't skip a stage: no script means no voiceover; no voiceover and no footage means no render.

The stages, in order

1. Script

The text of the future video. Prepared one of two ways:

Rewrite (RW) — the source material is rewritten in fresh words.
Translate (TR) — a finished script is translated into another language (for clone channels).

2. SEO

Prepares titles, descriptions and keywords for the video — the things that help it get found on YouTube.

3. Voiceover (TTS)

Turns the script text into speech — the audio track of the future video.

4. Video prompts (storyboard)

Splits the script into scenes and writes a prompt for each one, which the next stage uses to generate the picture/video.

5. Video generation

AI creates the video clips from the storyboard prompts. These clips are what the final video is later assembled from.

6. Render

Puts it all together — footage plus voiceover — into a finished file via ffmpeg with GPU acceleration. More: Render.

Render only starts when all three are ready at once: a finished script, a finished voiceover, and 100% of the footage generated. If anything is missing, the stage waits.

7. Publish to YouTube

Uploads the finished video to the channel along with its title and description. More: Publishing to YouTube.

The "⭐ Funnel" tab — how to read it

The ⭐ Funnel tab shows all channels at once and which stage each video is at. The columns run left to right, exactly along the pipeline:

Writer (script) → Voicer (voiceover) → Step10 (video prompts) → Step11 (footage) → Render → YouTube (publish)

Each cell shows the stage status for that video:

Ready to run — the stage can be started.
In queue / working — the job is already running.
Done ✅ — the stage is finished; you can move on.
Error 🛑 — the stage failed and needs attention.
Paused by AI limit ⏸ — an AI provider limit kicked in; the job is waiting.

Read the Funnel left to right: the stage a video is "stuck" on is the leftmost column that doesn't yet have a ✅.

Bulk launch and priorities

Every stage is a job queue, and you can run it two ways:

In bulk — send many videos into a stage with one button. Handy when you want to push a whole channel through.
One by one — run a single specific video, for example to check the result before a big run.

Inside a queue there are priorities: the ⏫ button moves a job up the queue so it gets picked up ahead of the others.

Auto mode vs. manual mode

There are two ways to move a video down the chain:

Auto mode — the system passes the video from stage to stage on its own: the script finishes and the voiceover starts, the footage is ready and the render starts, all the way to YouTube.
Manual mode — it pauses after each stage so you can check the result and only then launch the next stage.

Start in manual mode on a channel's first videos — that way you see what each step produces. Once the quality is fine, switch to auto mode and launch in bulk.

What to do on an error or a pause

Status ⏸ (paused by AI limit). This is not an error. An AI provider limit kicked in and the job is simply waiting. Usually you just wait — when the limit frees up, the stage continues on its own.

Status 🛑 (error). The stage failed and needs attention:

Find the video and the column showing 🛑 in the Funnel — that's the failing stage.
Open that stage's queue and re-run the job — many errors are one-offs (a network blip, a temporary glitch) and clear on a retry.
If it keeps failing, check that the earlier stages' requirements are met. Especially for render: it needs a ready script, a voiceover, and 100% of the footage.

Don't start a render until the footage is 100% generated — the stage still can't assemble a video from an incomplete set of clips.