How to Make Video With Remotion and Claude Code (Full Guide)

Editing is hard. Anyone who's tried it knows how time-consuming it can be. Even a thirty-second clip can take a whole afternoon.

Not anymore. You can now describe a video in plain words and have it built for you by Claude Code, an AI that works inside a tool called Remotion. Say "make a title card that fades in," and it appears. Ask for captions or a tighter cut, and it changes while you watch.

No timeline, no keyframes. The only thing to learn now is how to ask.

Below, we'll walk you through setting it up so you can do the same, plus a few prompts to try it out yourself.

What Remotion and Claude Code are

Remotion is an open-source tool that makes video out of code. Instead of a timeline, you have small components that describe what each frame looks like, and Remotion turns them into a normal MP4. Developers have used it for years, and because the whole video lives in code, you can change one value and get a new version.

And now, you don't have to write that code. Claude Code does. It's Anthropic's AI coding agent, running in your terminal. You describe the video you want, it writes the components, and if you don't like something, you tell it in plain words and it updates it.

That's the shift. The only skill you need is knowing what to ask for. Ask for captions, a faster cut, or a new color, and Claude makes the change while the preview updates in front of you.

Remotion also publishes a set of skill files for Claude Code, and that's what makes it reliable. Install them, and Claude learns how Remotion works, so its first version usually comes close to what you asked for.

Setting it up

Getting it running takes only a few minutes. Here's the quick version, and if you want every step broken down, the full walkthrough goes deeper.

What you need

You need two things. Node.js, and Claude Code set up on a paid Claude plan or API billing. If you already use Claude Code for coding, you're set, and there's nothing else to buy.

Installing the skill

If you already have a Remotion project, go into its folder in your terminal and run this.

npx skills add remotion-dev/skills

That installs the skill files.

If you're starting from scratch, this command builds a new project for you and offers to add the skills as it sets up.

npx create-video

Say yes to the skills, the recommended agents, and Tailwind. Either way you end up with the skills installed and a project ready to go. There's a deeper guide to installing the skill if you want the step-by-step.

These commands are current as of 2026-07-12. For the latest, check remotion.dev/docs/ai.

Your first video

From inside your project folder, start the live preview.

npm run dev

That opens Remotion Studio in your browser. Open a second terminal, go into the same folder, and start Claude.

cd your-project
claude

Now give it a plain prompt, like "make a five-second title card with the text Hello World fading in." Within a few seconds the card shows up in the preview. Tell Claude what to adjust, watch the preview update, and render once you're happy with it.

And that's it. You get a finished MP4 without writing any code.

Getting good results

Write a prompt it can build toward

Your first prompt decides how much you fix later. Give Claude specifics and the first version comes back close to what you want. Something like "make a 10-second product demo, three features, each on screen two seconds, white background, bold sans-serif text" tells it exactly what to build.

But something vague like "make a cool video about my product" leaves the length, style, and pacing to guesswork, and you'll spend your first few rounds getting back to a starting point you could have asked for up front.

So the more time you spend specifying what you want in the prompt, the less you fix after.

Iterate by talking to it

From there you refine by talking. Watch the preview, tell Claude what's wrong in plain words, and it edits the code so the preview updates. Keep going until it looks right, then render.

Here's a trick that helps a lot. Drag a reference image into the terminal and ask Claude to rebuild it as a composition. Keep the first ask simple. If you pile on detail, it tends to struggle with what to prioritize, so let it take a first pass and correct from there. The same works with a screen recording for style, or a CSV when you want a chart from real numbers.

Prompts to start from

Here are a few templates to try. Fill in your details in the brackets and Claude handles the rest. Paste it in, then adjust from there.

Explainer video

Good when you have the message but don't want to plan out the scenes yourself.

Product demo

The repeatable structure means you can hand Claude a new feature list next month and get a matching video back fast.

Testimonial video

Run it against a folder of testimonials with just the text swapped each time.

Data viz

It pulls straight from your real numbers, which is exactly what this tool is good at.

Captions and overlays

Useful if you just want a quick way to add depth to your videos.

For a deeper set of tested prompts and what came back from each, see the Remotion + Claude Code prompt library.

Common problems and fixes

A few things trip people up no matter how well they prompt. Here's how to clear them.

Scenes all play at once

This is the one you'll run into the most. It happens when Claude doesn't stagger the timing between scenes. Tell it the scenes are overlapping and to space them out, and it usually fixes it in one round.

Text gets cut off at the edges

On vertical video, the platform's buttons and bars cover the top and bottom of the screen. Tell Claude to keep text inside the safe zone, away from the top and bottom edges, and it pulls everything in.

Claude can't see inside your footage

Claude can lay graphics over a clip you drop in. What it can't do is see what's inside the footage on its own. To have it work from what's actually in the video, prompt it to pull the frames out with FFmpeg first and use those as a reference.

Is it worth it?

For a lot of creator work, yes, and the range is what makes it useful. You can hand it a long-form video and get short-form clips back, quickly add captions to long-form or short-form content, or lay b-roll visualizations over your footage. You can also build a whole video from scratch, like a product explainer, a launch video, or a quick one for yourself.

It does have limits. Anything organic, hand-drawn, or something that can't be done with code tends to come out stiff. And a pro using After Effects or DaVinci Resolve will still get better output.

Still, the barrier is low, the results already look good, and you make it by describing what you want. This is the direction video is heading. Learn it now and you'll be ahead of it when it becomes the default.