Kamol Nazarov The back office lab Brooklyn, NY

N°10 · Video studio · 2026 · Tailnet only

H3 Studio

Video, recasts and voiceovers come out of one studio, and a budget guard refuses any job that would take spend past my cap.

Client
Internal, my own video and voice work
Role
Author · product, engineering, ops
Built with
Node 22, Hono, SQLite, React 19, Vite, ffmpeg, the MiniMax-H3 and ElevenLabs APIs, an MCP server for Claude Code
Status
Live on my own server · private repo
Live at
h3.kamol.dev, reachable only from my private network (tailnet). It isn’t open to the public, by design.
A monitor on a desk in the shop’s back office at night, beside a broadcast microphone, headphones and a small camera, showing the H3 Studio home screen: “What are we making today?”
Live studio · Oct 21

What it does

  1. 01

    Recast, cut at the shot

    Swap the people in a clip and keep its motion and cuts. Hard cuts are found with ffmpeg, whole shots are packed into chunks of 15 seconds or less for MiniMax-H3, and the results are trimmed and stitched back in order.

  2. 02

    A budget guard that refuses first

    Before a job is sent, settled and in-flight spend are added to its estimate. If the total would pass the cap ($5 of MiniMax, 10,000 ElevenLabs characters), the job is refused, not billed.

  3. 03

    A story needs its source

    On the TokensAt10 episode desk, each story slot needs a character, a script and a source citation before it can be produced: voice first, then video, then a kept take. Kept takes export with a manifest of scripts, citations and costs.

The thing to see

The Recast lane: a source clip, one photo per person, who becomes whom and an optional voiceover. Clips longer than 15 seconds are split at their cuts and stitched back. Live studio, Oct 21.
The Recast lane: a source clip, one photo per person, who becomes whom and an optional voiceover. Clips longer than 15 seconds are split at their cuts and stitched back. Live studio, Oct 21.

Proof

  • 16MCP tools, so Claude Code runs the same jobs, ledger and episode desksrc/mcp/tools.ts
  • 13tests, all passing offline against mocked providers on Oct 21, 2026npm test
  • 15 slongest chunk sent to MiniMax-H3 in one task; longer clips are split at their cutssrc/core/h3plan.ts

No spend total or take count is published. Costs come from the rate card and each provider’s reported usage, and none has been checked against an invoice.

On screen

The Video lane: references, text, or start and end frames, with character references, reference clips and a voiceover.
The budget guard: “Submissions past a cap are refused.” MiniMax at $0.00 of $5.00, ElevenLabs at 47 of 10,000 characters.
The studio home on a phone: generate a video, recast footage, create a voiceover, plan an episode.
The Episodes desk, still empty: “Every slot needs a script and its source before it can be produced.”

Captured from the live studio over my private network on Oct 21, 2026, with every write request blocked. It holds no episodes or videos yet, so most screens are empty states.