Originally published at ffmpeg-micro.com
You run a one-person operation. You know you should be posting video content. But you're also the one building the product, handling support, and managing the business. The idea of opening editing software 100 times a week sounds like a joke.
It's not a joke if you take the editor out of the equation.
This post walks through a real pipeline that lets a solo operator publish 100+ videos a week across YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels without touching editing software once. The whole thing runs on an automation tool, a video processing API, and about 30 minutes of initial setup.
Why 100 Videos Isn't as Crazy as It Sounds
Most people think "100 videos" means 100 shoots. It doesn't. It means having source footage (or templates) and a system that turns them into platform-ready clips automatically.
A 10-minute podcast episode can become 15-20 short clips. A single product demo can be reformatted for three platforms. Five blog posts can turn into five text-on-video pieces per post. The math adds up fast when the system handles the repetitive work.
The bottleneck was never ideas or footage. It was the manual step of opening Premiere, DaVinci, or CapCut, trimming each clip, adding captions, exporting at the right resolution, and doing that over and over.
The Pipeline
The full system has four stages:
Source content goes in. This could be long-form video you've already recorded, podcast episodes, screen recordings, or even just text content that gets turned into video via templates.
An automation tool orchestrates everything. n8n, Make.com, or Zapier watches for new content (a new file in Google Drive, a new row in Airtable, a webhook from your CMS) and kicks off the processing jobs.
FFmpeg Micro handles the video processing. Each job is an API call. Trim to 60 seconds for Shorts. Scale to 9:16 for TikTok. Add a text overlay. Burn in captions. Compress for upload. No FFmpeg install. No server to manage.
The outputs get distributed. The automation tool takes the processed videos and uploads them to each platform, or drops them in a folder for scheduled posting.
A Real Example: Blog Posts to Video Clips
Say you publish 5 blog posts a week. Each post has a headline and 3-4 key points. You want a short video for each key point with text-on-screen overlay. That's 15-20 videos per week from content you already wrote.
The n8n workflow breaks down into three steps:
- A webhook fires when a new blog post is published
- n8n pulls the title and key points from the post
- For each key point, n8n calls FFmpeg Micro to overlay the text on a background video template
The FFmpeg Micro API call for each clip:
{
"inputs": [{"url": "https://your-bucket.storage.com/background-template.mp4"}],
"outputFormat": "mp4",
"options": [
{
"option": "@text-overlay",
"argument": {
"text": "You don't need editing software to post 100 videos a week",
"style": {
"charsPerLine": 20,
"fontSize": 54,
"lineSpacing": 12,
"x": "(w-text_w)/2",
"y": "(h-text_h)/2",
"boxBorderW": 10
}
}
}
]
}
That's it. One API call per clip. n8n loops through every key point and fires these in parallel.
- n8n downloads the finished videos and uploads to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or a Google Drive folder for batch scheduling
No editing software opened. No manual export. No resizing one clip at a time.
Scaling to 100 a Week
To hit triple digits, combine multiple content sources:
Podcast clips (40-50/week). Record 2 podcast episodes. Each one produces 20-25 clips when you trim at interesting timestamps. FFmpeg Micro handles the trim, the 9:16 crop, and the caption overlay in a single job.
{
"inputs": [{"url": "https://your-bucket.storage.com/podcast-ep-42.mp4"}],
"outputFormat": "mp4",
"options": [
{"option": "-ss", "argument": "00:04:32"},
{"option": "-t", "argument": "58"},
{"option": "-vf", "argument": "crop=ih*9/16:ih,scale=1080:1920"}
]
}
Blog-to-video (15-20/week). The text overlay workflow above. Five posts, 3-4 clips each.
Product demos (10-15/week). Record one 20-minute walkthrough and slice it. Each feature gets its own clip.
Reposts across platforms (20-30/week). Take your best-performing clips and reformat them for platforms you haven't posted to yet. A vertical TikTok video becomes a square Instagram post with padding:
{
"inputs": [{"url": "https://your-bucket.storage.com/tiktok-clip.mp4"}],
"outputFormat": "mp4",
"options": [
{"option": "-vf", "argument": "scale=1080:1080:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1080:1080:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:black"}
]
}
Each of these is a single API call. Your automation tool fires them in batch, downloads the results, and either auto-publishes or queues them for review.
What This Actually Costs
FFmpeg Micro charges per minute of video processed. A 60-second short costs about one minute of processing time. At 100 clips per week, you're looking at roughly 100 minutes of processing. The free tier covers small-scale testing. A paid plan handles the full volume.
Compare that to hiring a video editor ($500-2000/month) or spending 20 hours a week in editing software yourself. The math isn't close.
Common Pitfalls
Don't process videos sequentially. Fire API calls in parallel from your automation tool. n8n's "split in batches" node lets you process 10-20 clips at once. Sequential processing turns a 15-minute pipeline into a 3-hour one.
Template backgrounds matter. If your text-on-video clips look generic, it's because the background template is generic. Invest an hour recording 5-10 branded background loops (abstract motion, your office, your product's UI) and rotate through them.
Platform specs change. TikTok updated their preferred aspect ratio in 2025. YouTube Shorts now accepts up to 3 minutes. Build your automation with configurable dimensions and durations so a spec change is a variable update, not a pipeline rebuild.
Don't skip the review step at first. Run the pipeline into a "review" folder for the first week. Spot-check 10% of the output. Once you trust the system, switch to auto-publish.
FAQ
Do I need to know FFmpeg commands to use this? No. FFmpeg Micro's preset system handles common operations (trim, scale, compress) with simple parameters. You only need raw FFmpeg options for custom work like specific filter chains.
What automation tools work with this? Any tool that can make HTTP requests. n8n, Make.com, and Zapier all work. So does a Python script, a Node.js cron job, or a Shortcuts workflow on macOS.
Will the videos look professional? That depends on your source material and templates, not the processing tool. FFmpeg Micro processes video at the same quality as FFmpeg running locally. If your source footage is 1080p, your output is 1080p.
Can I add captions/subtitles automatically? Yes. Pair a transcription API (Whisper, Deepgram, AssemblyAI) with FFmpeg Micro. The transcription API generates the subtitle file, and FFmpeg Micro burns it into the video.
What if a job fails? FFmpeg Micro returns clear error messages on failure. Your automation tool can catch the error and retry or alert you. Failed jobs don't charge processing time.
Last verified: June 2026. API examples use FFmpeg Micro v1.
