Silence as a production value

The generator bakes sound into clips without telling you. I found out during a whiteboard pilot: a harsh metallic hit at second ten, in a scene made for kids. Concat carried it into the final cut silently — ffmpeg doesn't ask, it just muxes. So now there's a law: after every generation, ffprobe for audio streams. Kids' content ships silent with -an unless sound was explicitly designed. Forty-eight posts live on the channel, every one of them checked against a single question: would this startle anyone? People hear "silent video" and think it's a limitation of the pipeline. It's the opposite — it's the pipeline growing up. Sound became a deliberate choice instead of a random artifact, and the work got better the moment randomness stopped making decisions. What random artifact in your pipeline are you still shipping?