Feed it a replay and its telemetry. It finds the moment, cuts it vertical, re-shoots it, and lays the numbers over the top.
driftclip is a tool built with and for Ian to automate short-form drift clips from Assetto Corsa. A telemetry sidecar captures what the car is doing; a moment detector reads that trace and decides where the clip is.
The mechanism is a chain of four phases, each feeding the next: telemetry in, a detected moment, an ffmpeg cut into a vertical frame, a CSP scripted-camera pass that re-shoots the replay, and finally the telemetry overlay and branding on top.
The hard part isn't the cutting. It's the detector. A drift has a peak and the clip has to land on it — but what counts as a good clip is Ian's call, not the code's. So the detector gets tuned only after he has said what he's looking for.
The overlay doesn't get its own data model. It shares the telemetry schema with YAW, the drift telemetry project for Ian's competitive drift car, so one definition of the data serves both the clips and the instruments. Don't invent a second one.
It lives in a Python repo and is built in Claude Code. Started September 2026.
Detect, cut, re-shoot, overlay. In that order, because each one needs the last.
Sidecar + detector
A telemetry sidecar captures the run alongside the replay. A moment detector reads the trace and picks the moment worth clipping. Scaffolded.
Vertical cuts
ffmpeg cuts the moment out of the replay into a vertical, short-form frame. Scaffolded.
Scripted-camera re-shoot
A CSP scripted camera replays the same moment and re-shoots it. Next.
Overlay + branding
Telemetry drawn over the footage, on the schema YAW already defines, plus branding. After that.
Two of four phases scaffolded. The detector is still waiting for a real capture.
Exists. Phases 1 and 2 as scaffolding: the sidecar and detector, and the ffmpeg vertical cuts.
Planned. Phase 3, the CSP scripted-camera re-shoot, then phase 4, the overlay — in that order.
What a "good clip" looks like, in Ian's words — asked before any detector tuning.