Real Estate Video Generator

Overview

When you tour 71 candidate properties across two states, the phone-video archive gets out of hand fast. This is the tool I wrote to bring it back under control: drag walkthrough clips into the order I want, stick an address title card on the front, append the issue-photo slideshow on the end, run the whole thing through vidstab to kill the handshake, and write a single H.264 MP4 to a known folder.

Status: v1.0, completed. ~75 KB of Python. It does exactly this and nothing else.

What's Honest Here

This is intentionally small. There's nothing architecturally clever here — it's an FFmpeg wrapper with a Tkinter list and a couple of useful defaults. I'm including it because it solves a real, specific step in the relocation workflow alongside Property Comparison, and because the practical fixes it took to ship are the kind of debugging that doesn't show up in a portfolio of polished projects.

What It Does

• Drag-to-reorder input list — clips go in the order you want, not the order the phone exported them
• Stabilization via vidstab (two-pass: detect → transform)
• Address title card rendered to a static PNG and prepended at known duration
• Issue-photo slideshow appended at end with per-photo dwell time
• Single H.264 MP4 output to a known folder by default (Documents / Property Walkthroughs)
• Drop a folder of phone clips, get a single shareable file

Tech Stack

• Python 3.11+
• FFmpeg + FFprobe with vidstab build (the one that actually has vidstabdetect / vidstabtransform)
• Tkinter for the drag-to-reorder UI
• Windows (PowerShell-friendly install path)

What I Did vs. What AI Did

My work:

• Defined the scope and held it — refused to add features that didn't ship the actual videos
• Worked around vidstab's filename-only quirk on Windows: the filter writes its transform file using a relative-path-only convention that breaks if you give it a fully qualified path with drive letter. The fix was a temp directory + cd into it for the duration of the two-pass run.
• Defaulted output to Documents/Property Walkthroughs/ because "where did it save" was the bug I kept hitting on my own tool
• Implemented drag-to-reorder on the input list because clip order is the actual content decision
• Validated against a real backlog of phone clips, not synthetic test data

AI-assisted:

• Tkinter scaffolding and the drag-and-drop event wiring
• Initial FFmpeg argument strings (most of which I had to fix when the real two-pass behaviour surprised me)
• Slideshow timing math

What I Learned

• vidstab is the right call for handheld walkthrough clips, but its Windows path handling will eat an afternoon if you don't know about it
• "Default to a known folder" is the smallest UX feature with the biggest payoff on a one-person tool
• Holding scope is harder than expanding it
• A 75 KB tool that ships every property tour you take is more valuable than a 75 MB tool that does ten things badly