Rustymotion

A Rust-based renderer for Remotion projects.

🚧 WARNING: This is exploratory work only, use at your own risk.

Design

Remotion allows you to easily write videos using React.

It exposes some functions from a React app to change the layout based on a specified composition and frame. The Remotion Renderer then serves this app on a URL and uses Puppeteer to loop over it and screenshot each frame. These are then stitched into a video file using FFmpeg.

I wanted to avoid a Node.js or server-based setup for one of my projects and have tried emulating the Remotion renderer using what I had on hand — this repo is the result of it working just enough.

Approach

1. We start with your Bundle. You can create one using either the Remotion CLI (set log-level to verbose) or the @remotion/bundler tool.
2. The headless-chrome-rust project is used to get composition details and screenshot frames.

Instructions

1. See src/main.rs for how to use the renderer.
2. Most of the renderer's code is in src/lib.rs.
3. Relevant findings from my tinkering with the Remotion bundle are in reference.js.
4. Running cargo run should hopefully give you a video in out.mp4 if all goes well.

TODO

Closing

Thanks for checking out this project! I made this hack (again) over a sleepless night or two. It is not intended for production nor can I offer any support for it. Just leaving it here as a POC for the Remotion team and others to hopefully spark some new ideas.

Happy to answer questions/queries over on Twitter or the Remotion Discord. See you there! 👋

PS: this is a new approach. You might like to check out my first attempt at this using Wry in the wry branch. Refer to the readme there for more info.