Remotion

Build videos programmatically with React components, CSS animations, and Remotion’s rendering pipeline for scalable video content.

What This Skill Does

The Challenge: Creating consistent, scalable video content for marketing (ads, social clips, product demos) is expensive and slow with manual video editing. Data-driven videos (personalized, localized, or batch-generated) are impossible with traditional tools.

The Solution: Remotion skill enables video creation through React components — animations, transitions, data binding, and voice-over sync all in code. Renders to MP4/WebM via Remotion’s CLI and Lambda rendering.

Activation

Implicit: Activates when creating programmatic video content, animated graphics, or data-driven video pipelines.

Explicit: Activate via prompt:

Activate remotion skill to create an animated product demo video

Capabilities

1. React Component Composition

Build video scenes as React components with frame-based animation.

import { AbsoluteFill, useCurrentFrame, interpolate } from 'remotion';

export const HeroScene = () => {
  const frame = useCurrentFrame();
  const opacity = interpolate(frame, [0, 30], [0, 1]);

  return (
    <AbsoluteFill style={{ backgroundColor: '#0f0f0f' }}>
      <div style={{ opacity, fontSize: 72, color: 'white' }}>
        Your headline here
      </div>
    </AbsoluteFill>
  );
};

2. Animation Primitives

Frame-based interpolation for smooth animations.

Core hooks:

  • useCurrentFrame() — Current frame number
  • interpolate(frame, input, output) — Value interpolation
  • spring({ frame, fps }) — Physics-based spring animation
  • useVideoConfig() — Video width, height, fps, duration

3. Composition and Timeline

Sequence multiple scenes with transitions.

import { Composition, Sequence } from 'remotion';

export const VideoRoot = () => (
  <Composition
    id="MarketingVideo"
    component={VideoTemplate}
    durationInFrames={300}
    fps={30}
    width={1920}
    height={1080}
  />
);

4. Rendering Pipeline

Render videos via CLI or Lambda for batch production.

# Local render
npx remotion render VideoRoot MarketingVideo output.mp4

# Lambda render (scalable)
npx remotion lambda render VideoRoot MarketingVideo

Prerequisites

  • Node.js 18+ and React 18+
  • remotion package installed
  • For Lambda: AWS account with Remotion Lambda deployed

Configuration

npm install remotion @remotion/cli

Video specs (set in Composition):

  • fps: 30 (standard) or 60 (smooth motion)
  • width x height: 1920x1080 (16
    ), 1080x1080 (square), 1080x1920 (vertical)

Best Practices

1. Keep scenes under 10 seconds Shorter scenes are easier to compose and maintain. Use <Sequence> to chain them.

2. Use spring for UI-like animations spring() produces physically realistic motion without hand-tuning keyframes.

3. Externalize data from components Pass text, colors, and images as props to enable data-driven batch rendering.

Common Use Cases

Use Case 1: Animated Social Media Ad

Scenario: Create a 15-second product highlight video for Instagram Reels.

Workflow:

  1. Design 3 scenes: Hook (3s) → Benefit (8s) → CTA (4s)
  2. Build React component per scene with fade + slide animations
  3. Sequence scenes with <Sequence> component
  4. Export at 1080x1920 (vertical) at 30fps

Output: MP4 ready for social upload.

Use Case 2: Data-Driven Personalized Video

Scenario: Personalized video reports for each customer showing their usage stats.

Workflow:

  1. Build template with props: { customerName, metric1, metric2 }
  2. Fetch customer data from API
  3. Batch render via Lambda with customer data as input
  4. Deliver via email or customer portal

Output: Automated personalized video pipeline.

Troubleshooting

Issue: Render crashes with memory error Solution: Reduce concurrent renders. Use Lambda for large batches.

Issue: Font not rendering in video Solution: Load fonts via @remotion/google-fonts or embed as data URI.

  • Video - Video content strategy and editing
  • UI Styling - CSS animations and styling
  • Shader - GLSL effects for video backgrounds
  • /ckm:remotion - Video creation workflows
  • /ckm:video - Video content planning