video-studio

🎬 Video Studio — a film studio you drive from chat

Turn one idea into a finished, on-brand film — in a few hours, from a chat prompt. A Claude Code skill that runs the whole pipeline for you: brand & storyboard intake → capture or generate → edit, grade & localise → deliver. No timeline app. No agency. No shoot day.

What is this?

Video Studio is a Claude Code skill: a SKILL.md + reference playbooks + scripts that teach Claude to produce and edit video end‑to‑end. You describe the film you want in plain language; the skill orchestrates the entire pipeline and only stops for two sign‑offs (the storyboard, and final approval).

It does two things, and combines them:

• 🎞️ Edit existing footage — inventory clips (local files or URLs), auto‑select the right shots by subject (it reads the frames, not just filenames), then trim, grade and cut to a polished film.
• 🤖 Full‑AI — keyframe‑first generation: build a consistent start‑frame per shot, animate it with image‑to‑video, letter it, score it, and cut it — never blind text‑to‑video.

…held to one premium quality bar the whole way. This isn't a meme‑clip generator; it's built to produce work a brand would pay for.

Why you'll want it

• From chat. No editor, no render farm, no manual export. Prompt → film.
• On‑brand by default. It adopts your existing style guide (or creates one), builds a reusable leader + outro bracket, and holds the lines you set on every film.
• A real quality bar. Crafted transitions (no hard‑cut‑by‑default), heavy readable titles with backing, one consistent grade + grain, a hook in the first 1.5s, audio levelled & ducked. It refuses to ship "technically works."
• Honest & scriptable. Proven tools glued into one pipeline — ffmpeg, ImageMagick, nano-banana, fal.ai. No black boxes. It even improves its own playbook after every job.
• Self‑checking. A tooling preflight runs before every job and stops and asks rather than silently degrading. And a one‑time doctor tells you if your machine is ready.

⚡ Quickstart

1. Install it — as a plugin (recommended) or a plain skill.

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add RichardTheuws/video-studio
/plugin install video-studio@theuws-video

Or manually, as a user‑level skill:

git clone https://github.com/RichardTheuws/video-studio.git
bash video-studio/install.sh    # copies the skill into ~/.claude/skills/video-studio/

2. Check your machine is ready:

bash ~/.claude/skills/video-studio/scripts/doctor.sh

The doctor reports exactly what you have, what's missing, and which mode you can run today (footage / AI / full) — with copy‑paste install commands for anything absent.

3. Add your keys (only what your mode needs) to ~/.config/video-studio/.env:

FAL_AI_KEY=...            # image-to-video + AI stills (full-AI mode)
GEMINI_API_KEY=...        # nano-banana keyframes (full-AI mode)
ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=...    # optional: voices / SFX

4. Just ask, in chat:

"Make a 60‑second launch film for our new feature. Adopt our brand from brand/style.md. Vertical cutdown too."

Claude loads the skill, runs the preflight, walks the intake gate, shows you a storyboard to approve, then produces the film. That's it.

New to Claude Code? It's Anthropic's agentic CLI — install it, cd into any project, and the skill activates automatically on any video task. See claude.com/claude-code.

🩺 Requirements

The doctor (skills/video-studio/scripts/doctor.sh) checks all of this for you. In short:

Primary platform: macOS. Most of it is portable to Linux (swap brew for your package manager).

How it works

  preflight ─► INTAKE (gate) ─► STORYBOARD (your sign-off) ─► capture / generate
                                                                     │
        deliver + docs ◄─ localise ◄─ edit, grade & score ◄─────────┘

The intake gate is where most of the time is saved: before a single frame is produced, the studio settles the brief and the brand — does a style guide exist to adopt, or must one be created? Is there a leader/outro? Does this need a storyboard? Which shots need generated keyframes? Getting this wrong is the most expensive mistake in any pipeline, so it's an explicit, non‑negotiable step.

Deep‑dive playbooks live in reference/:

• tooling.md — every tool, how to check it, how to install it
• brand-intake.md — the intake gate: brand adopt/create, leader/outro, storyboard, keyframe plan
• commercial-craft.md — the premium bar: transitions, readable titles, grade, pacing, QA checklist
• models.md — model registry (image + image‑to‑video + audio) with costs & params
• consistency.md — consistent characters across shots (anchor reference, keyframe‑first, text‑less + lettering)
• montage-ffmpeg.md — montage recipes + hard‑won ffmpeg gotchas
• existing-footage.md — probe, download, subject auto‑select, trim/concat/grade
• landscape-from-vertical.md — reframe 9:16 ↔ 16:9 without stretching
• titles-hyperframes.md — the title layer: one HTML composition for 9:16 + 16:9, words that build, rendered as one transparent overlay (templates/titles/)
• directing.md — direction & rhythm: shot grammar fixed before generation, cut lengths, measurable QA (+ scripts/pick-window.sh)
• title-sequence.md — a brand leader / title sequence: text in the world, one visible cut
• storyboard-keyframes.md — a visual keyframe board as the cheap gate before image‑to‑video (+ scripts/storyboard.sh)
• vertical-916.md — a real 9:16 master, never a squashed or blurred 16:9
• series-production.md — one film → a series or campaign, from one proven template
• scroll-video.md — a film the visitor plays by scrolling
• print-on-product.md — a print on a product that reads as real, measured not guessed
• lessons.md — a running log of production lessons

The quality bar (the part most tools skip)

Four defaults it never ships with:

1. No hard cuts by default — premium leans on crafted transitions (cross‑dissolves, dip‑to‑white, speed‑ramps, J/L‑cuts). A hard cut is a deliberate choice on the beat.
2. No thin, unreadable titles — text is always heavy (700–900), large, and on backing (scrim / plate / bar). One type system.
3. No flat, jumping grade — one consistent, rich grade across every shot, plus grain.
4. Never "technically works" — a moving medium is judged on a dense frame‑strip and real playback, never on stray thumbnails, and one cut is validated before fanning out to languages or formats.

⭐ Star it

If this saves you a shoot day — or just makes you smile — give it a star. It's the fastest way to help other builders find it, and it's the only thanks the repo asks for.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome — new montage recipes, model updates, platform ports, better prompts. The skill is designed to grow: every lesson goes into reference/lessons.md and the CHANGELOG.

License

MIT — use it, fork it, ship films with it.

Built by Theuws Consulting. Born from a game trailer that came out so good it became a studio — the story.