Turning a handheld lake video into a macOS aerial screensaver
TL;DR I wanted a canoe-on-a-lake clip from my September backcountry trip as an Apple-style moving wallpaper and screensaver on the Mac Studio. macOS 27 has no “use my video” button, so Claude Code built one. The clip was 75 seconds of handheld 4K HLG at 120 fps. It was tone-mapped to SDR with VideoToolbox, locked to the far treeline with OpenCV ECC (correlation ≥ 0.991 on every frame) and cut into a 45-second loop with no visible seam. The tripod lock costs a 7.75% crop. The seam needed two fixes nobody would think of up front: a morph crossfade for foreground parallax, and -g 600 because ffmpeg’s default keyframe interval made the water pulse ten times a second. It’s installed as a real aerial by adding an entry to the per-user manifest Apple ships, with a LaunchAgent that re-adds it if Apple refreshes the catalog. The desktop ended up as the 48 MP still taken 14 seconds earlier, and the video runs as the screensaver. ...