Video — the production studio

The Video view is a programmatic production studio: you write a brief, a staged agent pipeline turns it into a composition, you review at each stage, and the render happens locally on your machine. Two complementary engines live behind one header switcher — an HTML-first engine (the default) that builds compositions from web-native markup and animation for exact text and brand fidelity in every frame, and a typed React engine that builds schema-validated React compositions. A footage workbench for raw recordings rounds out the studio.

Video is an Ultra surface — it is the AI Video Production module on that tier, see Tiers: Pro & Ultra. On Pro the view stays visible with a lock and an upgrade note.

What "production" means here, precisely

The studio is a compositor and renderer, not a generative video model. There is no text-to-video model anywhere in it. What the pipeline writes is a composition — markup, animation timelines, typed props — and what the renderer does is capture that composition frame by frame. Every frame is a deterministic render of something you can open and read.

That is the reason your own wording survives to the final frame, and it is also the honest limit: the studio will not invent footage of a thing that does not exist. It will lay out, animate, cut, and finish the material you give it — your text, your assets, your recordings, and any imagery you generate separately.

Install an engine (opt-in, on demand)

The engines are substantial dependencies, so they are not part of the base install — each sets up on demand, any time after installation, from a setup card that renders in place of the engine's surface until it is installed:

1. Open the Video view and pick the engine in the header switcher.
2. The setup card states exactly what one click does: install the engine's dependencies and pre-fetch the local render browser (a roughly 150 MB download used for frame-accurate capture).
3. For the React engine — Remotion — a license checkbox must be ticked first: Remotion is source-available and free for individuals and small companies, while larger companies need their own Remotion company license. The card records your acceptance; assessing eligibility is yours. The HTML-first engine — Hyperframes — is Apache-2.0 licensed and installs with a plain button.
4. Watch the install progress on the card; a failed browser fetch can be retried on its own without reinstalling.

Either engine can be uninstalled later from the engine's manage menu; installing one engine never requires the other.

Node and ffmpeg are installed for you

The engines run on Node 22, and footage preparation uses ffmpeg. Neither is something you have to go and install. Both are managed components: Command Center carries a pinned, checksum-verified copy of each and fetches it when it is first needed.

• Node. If the engine install finds no Node on your machine, it fetches the pinned Node 22 (npm included) into Command Center's own tools folder and continues. Nothing on your system changes.
• ffmpeg. Fetched automatically the first time footage preparation or a render needs it.

Where to see and steer this:

The Prefer control decides which copy wins when both a managed one and one on your PATH exist: Auto uses your system copy once its version meets the pinned major and falls back to the managed copy otherwise, while System and Managed pin the answer. Set it to System if you maintain your own Node or ffmpeg and want the studio to use exactly that.

Skipping a component is honored rather than quietly overridden: with the video runtime switched off, nothing is fetched behind you, and the engine install reports that npm was not found instead — at which point installing Node yourself, or re-enabling the component in Doctor, both work.

The HTML-first studio (default engine)

The surface is a brief list plus a per-brief workspace. Create a brief with a name and your creative direction — the brief is a single free-form field, optionally enriched with assets, reference files or URLs, and a capture of a website the video is about.

Each brief opens into staged tabs — Footage · Brief · Storyboard · Video Editor · Files · Renders · Capture · Catalog · Templates — and the production pipeline runs as three agent stages you dispatch in order, reviewing between each:

1. Author brief. The first agent reads your direction plus every reference in full and rewrites the brief denser and reference-aware — the same field, tightened. Re-run it whenever the direction changes.
2. Plan. The planner turns the brief into a storyboard: per-beat creative direction — mood, camera, assets, exact building-block picks and transitions — as a document you read and can edit before anything is built.
3. Author. The third agent installs the planned building blocks, writes the composition files, wires the animation timelines, and self-checks its output before finishing.

Review the result in Video Editor — an interactive, scrubbable player rather than a still preview, which is what the tab's name is telling you. Inspect what was written in Files, then render; finished renders collect in Renders. Capture manages website captures used as source material, and Catalog browses the installed block library. Templates holds saved project templates, which are global rather than per-brief.

Footage leads the rail deliberately: raw material comes before the brief that will be built over it.

Footage preparation

The Footage tab inside an HTML-first brief is the raw-recording workbench: bring an mp4 — a talking-head take, a screen capture — and prepare it into a clean cut before graphics are authored over it. Transcription, filler-word and dead-silence removal, trim and split on a visual timeline, color grading, and a rendered prepared clip that lands in the brief's assets. It uses ffmpeg, which the app fetches for you as described above.

The typed React studio

Switch the header to the React engine for the schema-validated pipeline. The tabs:

The pipeline here is also three staged agents: a brief author enriches your draft's creative hints, a script author writes the scene-by-scene production script and picks the compositions, and a composer produces a schema-correct render proposal plus a readable walkthrough of what it intends. You review the proposal in the brief — then dispatch Produce to render, or send it back with edit instructions and iterate. Renders land in History.

Costs and requirements

• The agent pipelines run on your own subscription — brief refinement, planning, and composition authoring are agent runs, on whichever agent CLI that stage is configured for. Claude is the documented path. See BYO Claude & keys.
• Rendering is local and free. Both engines render on your machine through the pre-fetched browser; no render service, no per-video fee.
• Node and ffmpeg are provisioned, not prerequisites — see above. The one-time downloads (engine dependencies plus the roughly 150 MB render browser) need disk and bandwidth.
• Generated imagery is optional and bring-your-own. A composition can place AI-generated stills you produce with your own image-generation key; the studio itself needs no model key, and it generates no video clips.

Where to go next

• Produce a video — the same ground as a walkthrough
• Tiers: Pro & Ultra — where Video sits in the subscription
• System requirements — what the install needs, and what it provisions for you
• Doctor — where components are enabled, repaired, and steered