# Diffusionstudio Watch > Watch and understand footage with Diffusion Studio via the `dapi` CLI: answer questions about a video or audio file, summarize it, find scenes and moments, pull quotes, and describe what happens and when. Use whenever the user asks what's in a piece of footage, wants a summary or recap, wants to locate a moment ("where does X happen", "find the scene where..."), or needs a claim about a video or audio file checked. - Skill: `remorses/diffusionstudio-watch` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add remorses/diffusionstudio-watch` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/remorses/diffusionstudio-watch/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: AI & ML - Author: remorses (https://skillmd.com/u/remorses) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/remorses/diffusionstudio-watch --- The CLI is self-describing and ships its own API reference. Use `dapi --help`, `dapi media --help`, and `dapi media --help` to enumerate every command, argument, and option, and treat live help as authoritative rather than working from memory. If `dapi` is unavailable, read [installation.md](references/installation.md). # Watching footage How to understand source material. Inspect only the modalities the question turns on — speech, action, music, graphics, or atmosphere may lead, so there is no fixed priority. Sample the picture against what the audio tells you. - **Always probe first.** `dapi media probe ` reports the container and its tracks, telling you up front whether the file has a video track, an audio track, or both. Everything after branches on that. - **Get the lay of the land.** Render a `dapi media waveform` (audio) and a `dapi media filmstrip` (video) for a fast, cheap overview of where the loud and quiet stretches fall, and where the visual scene changes are. A filmstrip shows coarse structure and scene state, not crop, framing, readability, or an exact cut frame. - **Listen to the audio.** Run `dapi media listen` with a prompt tailored to the context (what you actually need to know), and explicitly ask the model to include timestamps in its answer. See [media-listen.md](references/media-listen.md) for prompt patterns. - **Transcribe speech.** For speech, `dapi media transcribe` prints the full transcript with word-level start/end times directly — read any segment straight from it. - **Sample the video against the audio.** Use `dapi media grab` to pull frames. When the audio has already pointed you at specific moments, feed those timestamps straight in from the transcript or listen output, e.g. `-t '00:32' '00:45' ...`. When you need a visual pass without such cues, reach for `--auto`: it scans the footage and keeps only the frames where the picture settles into a new visual state, dropping near-duplicates. # Matching depth to the question Read only as much of the footage as the answer requires — each pass costs time, and `listen` costs credits. - A duration or format question ends at `probe`. - "Where is the quiet part" or "how is it paced" is usually answered by the waveform and filmstrip alone. - A question about what was said resolves fastest through `transcribe`; quote the transcript and its times directly. - Questions about non-speech audio (music, tone, sound events, speaker identity) are what `listen` is for. - Only questions about what is *seen* need frames — and the audio pass usually tells you which moments to grab, so grab those instead of scanning blind. - For open-ended questions ("summarize this", "what happens here"), combine passes: structure from waveform + filmstrip, content from transcript or listen, then frames at the salient moments to confirm what the picture shows. # Answering - Ground every claim in something you actually saw or heard — a transcript line, a listen answer, a grabbed frame. If the evidence is ambiguous, say so rather than smoothing over it. - Anchor answers to the timeline. Give timestamps as `MM:SS` (or `HH:MM:SS` for long footage) so the user can jump straight to the moment; for a scene or segment, give its start and end. - When asked to find a scene or moment, return the timestamp range plus a one-line description of what identifies it, so the user can confirm it is the right one. - Summaries follow the footage's own structure: what happens, in order, with the timestamps where each part begins. Length matches what the user asked for, not what the footage contains. - This skill only reads footage. When the user wants the footage changed — cut, composed, captioned, exported — that is the `editor` skill's job.