| Hard | The same inputs produce the same plan, byte for byte, with no randomness. Ties are broken by earlier start, then lower index. | A plan nobody watches being made must be reproducible and auditable, so any difference traces to a rule, not to chance. |
| Hard | Every decision records the rule that fired and the score behind it. | When someone asks why minute six looks the way it does, the answer is in the plan. |
| Hard | The presenter is on screen at most 66% of the runtime, every framing with a person in it combined. | The cap exists to stop a lecture becoming a recording of someone talking. The presenter beside the slide is not that, so the two are capped separately and this ceiling is the looser of the pair. |
| Hard | The framings that are only the presenter — a face with captions, a face alone — hold at most 16% of the runtime between them. | This is the one that was really meant by the old 40%. A face holds the eye without adding information; the slide with the lecturer beside it adds both. |
| Hard | The animated lecture holds the frame alone only while it is moving. Where nothing on it would change for more than 20 seconds, the plan is rejected. | Settled text is not a shot. It is the defect a student feels first and the one that was hardest to see from inside the engine. |
| Guide | Aim for no stretch over 8 seconds in which the animated lecture does not change. Where a full-frame run would hold still longer, the whole run goes to Presenter + Animated instead; where the presenter budget cannot reach, a cutaway is placed over it. | Eight seconds is about as long as a settled slide holds attention. Three budgets bind at once, so what cannot be reached is reported rather than forced. |
| Hard | Every company the script names has a card before the teaching visual is chosen. | A lecture that says Maruti and shows a generic office has wasted the moment it was given. |
| Hard | A window naming the lecture's own story character scores higher, and every shot of that person is generated from one fixed description. | A story with a different stranger in every shot is a story with no face at all. |
| Hard | The lecture opens on the presenter and is in an animated layout by 0:15. | A course needs a face before a deck, but a talking head that stays tells the viewer in fifteen seconds this is just a recording. Drop-off research puts a large share of abandonment in the first few percent of runtime. |
| Hard | Structure over 1.6 × delivery goes to Full Animated, delivery over 1.6 × structure goes to Presenter + Captions, and everything else goes to Presenter + Animated. | A stretch must be clearly one thing to earn a committed layout. Ambiguity always resolves to the middle layout, which reads acceptably for both. |
| Hard | No layout run lasts longer than 120 s. | Held longer, a layout stops being a choice and becomes the format: six minutes of deck is a slideshow with narration. |
| Hard | Scenes (Full Animated, Presenter + Animated) last at least 8 s. | The floor stops the edit flickering. A scene that has been cut into by a presenter shot is doing its job. |
| Hard | Presenter + Captions and Presenter Centred last 4.5 to 15 s. | They are cuts, not scenes, used to open the lecture, cover an empty slide or break a long animated run. |
| Hard | The animated lecture never holds the frame for more than 60 s without a break. | A short presenter cut gives the viewer a change of shot for a fifth of the presenter budget a full scene would cost. |
| Hard | No full-frame slide shows only its heading for more than 4.5 s. | A slide with nothing on it, held for five seconds, reads as a stall. Those stretches are known exactly and given to the presenter. |
| Hard | No two adjacent runs share a layout. | Two consecutive runs of the same layout are one run with a visible seam. |
| Hard | Every layout change and cutaway edge sits on a phrase boundary. | This is the only thing standing between an automated pipeline and a cut in the middle of a word. |
| Hard | A measured wide presenter changes the size of the Presenter + Captions split and never removes the layout. | A gate that preferred another layout for wide presenters removed Presenter + Captions from a whole lecture, and the story beats lost their face. |
| Hard | Only the source gates may remove presenter layouts: no usable green screen, a presenter out of frame more than 8% of the time, or a failed key edge. | Those are the cases where the footage genuinely cannot support them, and the plan records the reason. |
| Hard | Generated cutaways take at most 18% of the runtime and drawn cutaways at most 10%. | Two separate allowances mean free drawing never competes with paid generation for the same seconds, and neither can take over the lecture. |
| Hard | There is at least one picture a minute, the first by 1:30, and no 60 s stretch without one. | An average can be met by nine pictures in the middle third and none for two minutes. Distribution has to be checked directly. |
| Hard | No cutaway lands in the first 15 s or the last 25 s. | The lecture opens and closes on the presenter. Gaps are measured only inside the window where a picture is allowed. |
| Guide | Cutaway windows must score at least 4.0 to join the main pool. | This threshold stops a budget being filled with weak candidates. Windows placed below it by the floor or gap passes are counted and reported. |
| Hard | Placed cutaways are 6.5 s or shorter, ideally 5 s. | A cutaway is punctuation. Held for seven or eight seconds, it feels as if the lecture has stopped. |
| Hard | No cutaway covers a definition, a quotation or a title in the deck. | Those are the moments the deck was written for. Covering them replaces the best thing on screen. |
| Hard | A window that names a real entity, or reads as a document, chart, statistic or headline, is never given generated imagery. | With no one reviewing, a generated image of a real brand, place, person or statistic is a fabricated depiction published under an institution's name. |
| Hard | Real stock footage is tried before any generation, and a near-miss never ships. | Real footage is free and genuinely real. A clip that does not clearly show what the sentence says drops to the next rung, never fills a slot. |
| Hard | Where nothing can honestly be photographed, the picture is drawn. | Forcing a generated photograph onto a roadmap line is how a lecture on human resources ends up illustrated with a field of cows. |
| Hard | No drawn treatment runs twice in a row. | Variety across cutaways is worth more than a slightly better fit for any one of them. |
| Hard | The 18% ceiling beats the 12% floor, and the 40 s / 120 s run rules give way to the stated precedence. | Padding with weak cutaways is worse than running light, and churn is worse than a single mismatched beat. |
| Hard | The generated-clip total is stated before any generation starts. | A cost reported afterwards is an invoice, not a decision. |
| Hard | A cutaway's id is its own start time in hundredths of a second, never its position in the list. | Position-based names shift when the plan changes and quietly open the wrong clip. An id made from the cutaway's own timestamp cannot shift. |
| Hard | A failed check or a missed target is written into the plan and the escalation list. The build carries on. | The pipeline must always produce something and must be honest about where that something is below standard. |
