Video — the production studio
Brief-to-video production on two complementary engines, a staged agent pipeline with review gates, and a footage workbench for raw recordings.
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 — see Tiers: Pro & Ultra. On Pro the view stays visible with a lock and an upgrade note.
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:
- Open the Video view and pick the engine in the header switcher.
- 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).
- 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.
- Watch the install progress on the card; a failed browser fetch can be retried on its own without reinstalling.
Both engines require Node.js 22+ on your machine — see System requirements. Either engine can be uninstalled later from the engine's manage menu; installing one engine never requires the other.
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 — Brief · Storyboard · Preview · Files · Renders · Capture · Footage · Catalog · Templates — and the production pipeline runs as three agent stages you dispatch in order, reviewing between each:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Preview, 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.
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. Footage preparation requires ffmpeg on your machine.
The typed React studio
Switch the header to the React engine for the schema-validated pipeline. Five tabs:
| Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Capabilities | A read-only overview of the composition toolkit — what the engine can mount |
| Templates | Operator-composed recipes you can reuse across briefs |
| Briefs | The production surface — draft a brief, dispatch the pipeline, review, produce |
| History | Every render, in flight and finished |
| Brand | Brand presets — colors, typography, and identity the pipeline applies |
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 Claude subscription — brief refinement, planning, and composition authoring are agent runs. 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.js 22+ for either engine; ffmpeg for footage preparation.
- Generative media is optional and bring-your-own. Compositions that incorporate AI-generated imagery or clips use model keys you provide; the studio itself needs none.
Where to go next
- Tiers: Pro & Ultra — where Video sits in the subscription
- System requirements — Node.js and the engine downloads
Products — the knowledge-product pipeline
Turn a thesis and a folder of raw material into a finished two-component knowledge product, stage by stage, with you directing every gate.
Voice — the hands-free assistant
Talk to your platform — realtime conversation, system-wide dictation, and a curated, pausable, audited tool reach across the whole desk.