/vt/ - Virtual Youtubers

can anyone explain what >>27598402 is doing with the "local" prompts? What is he trying todo there? what's with the asterisks, the $dur, the ${trim}, the k at the end of "targ_bv="
I've been throwing my brain at it for hours and all I got is a slightly decolored webm the size of 1.1M instead of the full 3.9-ish I wish to get.
my input file is a clipped yt-dlp webm that already has the sound removed, so I'm only concerned with the two pass lines to encode a shrunken video. I figured out how to show the log for troubleshooting by removing the -v quiet command. the problem seems to manifest in how my first pass keeps telling me that the output file is empty and the bitrate is N/A.
I didn't want to use the clipping program again because my laptop struggles to play video on it, and using ffmpeg probably could yield better result from what I've read