Claude Video Skills: How Claude Makes Video With Code

Claude video skills let Claude make video by writing code, not by generating pixels. Claude doesn't produce video on its own. What it can do, once you give it the right skill, is write a video as code (React with Remotion, or HTML with HyperFrames), drive ffmpeg to cut and encode clips, and write the script, storyboard and subtitles around them. Your machine does the rendering. Claude does the authoring.

That distinction decides which tool you need:

• Motion graphics, product promos, data videos, explainers with text and shapes: a code-based video skill. Remotion's official Agent Skills are the most complete option.
• Trimming, joining, resizing and re-encoding footage you already have: an ffmpeg skill, usually one you write yourself in a few lines.
• Planning a video before anyone builds it: a script or storyboard skill.
• Realistic footage of people, places or products that don't exist yet: not Claude. That's a generative video model such as Veo or Runway.

Below is what each kind of skill does, where it stops, and a short walkthrough that takes Claude Code from an empty folder to a 15-second promo.

What Claude can and can't do with video

Start with the limits, because they shape everything else.

Anthropic's vision documentation is blunt: Claude is "an image understanding model only." It reads JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP images, and for animated GIFs it only sees the first frame. It can't generate, edit or produce images, and video isn't one of its input formats at all.

So in practice:

The pattern is the same in every row that works: Claude writes instructions or code, and a real tool on your machine turns them into frames. That's why Claude Code is where video skills make the most sense. It can create files, run Node and ffmpeg, look at rendered stills and fix what it sees.

If skills themselves are new to you, our guide to how Claude skills work covers the basics: a skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that Claude loads when your request matches its description.

The Claude video skills worth installing

Here's the short list. Every entry is an official skill or repo you can open and read, not a listing on a skills aggregator.

Remotion Agent Skills (React video)

Remotion is a framework for writing videos in React. Every frame is a component, so anything a web page can show, a video can show, and Claude already writes React well.

Remotion maintains its own Agent Skills, which work with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents. The skills repo installs with npx skills add remotion-dev/skills, or with npx remotion skills add inside a Remotion project. The set is split by job:

• /remotion-create starts a new project or composition
• /remotion-markup covers animation, layout, typography, fonts, audio and timing
• /remotion-captions handles captions and subtitles
• /remotion-maps does animated routes, markers and map flyovers
• /remotion-studio and /remotion-render launch the preview and render the file
• /remotion-best-practices is the umbrella skill when you don't know which to pick

If you'd rather not touch the terminal, Remotion also maintains a Claude Code plugin that bundles the same skills, with /remotion:remotion-create as the starting point. Skills and the plugin are Remotion's current route for agents; its earlier hosted MCP server has been shut down.

Why skills matter here: without them, Claude tends to write video like a web page, with CSS transitions and timers that don't render frame-accurately. The skills steer it toward Remotion's frame-based patterns, so the preview matches the MP4.

One thing to check before you ship anything commercial: Remotion isn't licensed like a typical open-source library. Its license page says it's free for individuals and companies of up to 3 people, and larger companies need a paid Company License.

HyperFrames skills (HTML video)

HyperFrames is HeyGen's open-source framework (Apache 2.0) that turns HTML, CSS, media and seekable animations into deterministic MP4 files. Same input, same video.

It ships skills that teach a coding agent its full loop: plan, write HTML, wire animations, add media, lint, preview, render. The core skills are /hyperframes, /hyperframes-cli, /hyperframes-registry and /media-use, with optional ones for Figma, slideshows and converting Remotion projects. In Claude Code it installs as a plugin, so the main skill shows up as /hyperframes:hyperframes.

Pick HyperFrames over Remotion if you think in HTML and CSS rather than React, or if your scenes start life in Figma. Pick Remotion if you want the larger set of specialised skills, such as maps and captions.

A Claude video editing skill for ffmpeg

For editing footage you already have, the tool is FFmpeg, the open-source command-line toolkit for converting, cutting and encoding audio and video. Claude Code can run it directly. The problem is consistency: ask twice and you may get two different encoding settings.

A small personal skill fixes that. You don't need to install anyone else's. Create ~/.claude/skills/clip-editor/SKILL.md:

---
name: clip-editor
description: Trim, join, resize and re-encode video files with ffmpeg. Use when the user asks to cut, shorten, merge, crop to vertical, or export a clip.
---

Before editing, run ffprobe on every input and report duration, resolution and frame rate.

Rules:
- Never overwrite an input file. Write to ./exports/ with a descriptive name.
- Default export: H.264 video, AAC audio, MP4, same frame rate as the source.
- For vertical social clips, scale and crop to 1080x1920.
- After every export, extract one frame from the middle of the result as a PNG and look at it before reporting back.

That last rule is the useful trick. Claude can't watch the video, but it can look at a still pulled from it, which catches black frames, bad crops and wrong aspect ratios before you open the file.

The "never overwrite" rule is an instruction, not a safeguard. A skill's allowed-tools field only pre-approves the tools it lists; Anthropic's skills documentation says every other tool stays under your existing permission settings. So leaving rm or ffmpeg out of that field doesn't make Claude ask first: if your permission mode or an earlier "don't ask again" already allows the command, it runs without a prompt.

If you want a confirmation before anything is deleted or overwritten, check what's currently allowed with /permissions, then add explicit rules to .claude/settings.json (ffmpeg's -y flag overwrites an existing output file without asking):

{
  "permissions": {
    "ask": ["Bash(rm *)", "Bash(ffmpeg -y *)", "Bash(ffmpeg * -y *)"]
  }
}

Per Claude Code's permissions guide, ask rules are checked before allow rules, so these still prompt even if a broader rule allows ffmpeg. Use deny instead of ask to block a command outright. Keep a copy of your original footage outside the project folder either way.

Script, storyboard and subtitle skills

Most bad videos were never planned. The cheapest skill in this whole list is the one that makes Claude write the plan first.

• Planning. Our HyperFrames Video Blueprint skill turns an idea into timed beats, scene cards and a checklist to judge the finished cut against. It deliberately doesn't render anything, so it works in Claude chat as well as Claude Code.
• Subtitles. Claude can't hear audio, so transcription needs a speech model. Remotion's captions guide covers importing .srt or .vtt files, transcribing with whisper.cpp, and exporting subtitles burned-in or as .srt. Claude's job is the part after transcription: fixing names, splitting long lines and styling the captions.
• GIFs. Anthropic's own slack-gif-creator skill builds short animated GIFs frame by frame in Python, with Slack's size and frame-rate limits baked in. It's the smallest working example of "Claude makes moving pictures with code."

Walkthrough: a 15-second promo with Claude Code and Remotion

This follows Remotion's own Claude Code setup guide. You need Node.js and Claude Code installed. Remotion's guide also notes that most coding agents, Claude Code included, need a paid subscription.

1. Create a blank project and add the skills.

npx create-video --yes --blank my-video
cd my-video
npx remotion skills add
npm run dev

The last command opens Remotion Studio, a live preview in your browser. Leave it running.

2. Start Claude Code in a second terminal, in the same my-video folder, by running claude.

3. Give it a specific brief. Vague prompts give you generic motion. Spell out length, size, scenes and style:

Using the Remotion skills, create a 15-second promo composition called Promo.
1080x1920 vertical, 30 fps (450 frames).

Scene 1 (0-3s): the product name "Brightdesk" scales in on a dark background.
Scene 2 (3-9s): three feature lines slide in one at a time:
  "Every inbox in one view", "Replies drafted for you", "Done before lunch".
Scene 3 (9-13s): a simple animated bar chart rising from 20% to 80%.
Scene 4 (13-15s): end card with the text "Try it this week" and a fade out.

Use one sans-serif font and an accent colour of #c6f24e.
Keep all timing frame-based so it renders exactly as previewed.

"Brightdesk" is a made-up product for this example. Swap in your own copy.

4. Review in the Studio, then iterate in plain language. Scrub through the preview and ask for changes the way you'd brief an editor: "Scene 2 feels rushed, give each line a full second," or "the chart labels are too small on a phone." Claude edits the components and the Studio updates.

5. Render. Either click Render in the Studio, or ask Claude to run the CLI, as documented in Remotion's render guide:

npx remotion render Promo

Ask Claude to pull a still from second 7 or so and check it before you post. That one frame catches most layout mistakes.

Expect two or three rounds of notes. The win isn't a perfect video from one prompt; it's that every change after the first is a sentence, not an hour in a timeline editor.

Where Claude video skills stop

Code-based video is great at anything you could describe as shapes, text, charts, screenshots and existing footage moving around. It's the wrong tool for:

• Realistic new footage. A person walking through a kitchen, a drone shot of a city, a product that hasn't been photographed. For that you need a generative model such as Google's Veo or Runway. Claude can still help by writing the prompts and the shot list.
• Voiceover. Claude writes the script. A text-to-speech tool or a human reads it.
• Judging motion. Claude reviews still frames, not playback. Timing, pacing and whether an animation "feels right" are still your call.

A practical split many people land on: generate the hero shots with a video model, then have Claude assemble them with titles, captions and an end card in Remotion or ffmpeg.

FAQ

Can Claude generate videos?

No. Claude doesn't output video, and Anthropic's documentation says it can't generate images either. With a coding agent like Claude Code and a skill such as Remotion's or HyperFrames', it writes the code that your computer renders into an MP4.

What is the best Claude video editing skill?

For editing existing footage, a short ffmpeg skill you write yourself, like the one above, is the most predictable. For making new motion graphics, Remotion's official Agent Skills are the most complete, and HyperFrames is the better fit if you prefer HTML and CSS.

Do Claude video skills work in the Claude app, or only in Claude Code?

Planning and scripting skills work anywhere skills do. Rendering skills need a place to run Node.js and ffmpeg, which is why they're built for coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Can Claude add subtitles to a video?

It can style and place them, and fix the transcript. The transcription itself comes from a speech model such as whisper.cpp, which Remotion's captions tooling supports.

Is Remotion free to use with Claude?

Yes for individuals and companies of up to 3 people, according to Remotion's license page. Larger companies need a Company License. Claude Code is billed separately by Anthropic.

The short version

• Claude makes video by writing code and commands. It doesn't generate footage.
• Remotion Agent Skills (React) and HyperFrames skills (HTML) are the two official, working ways to have Claude build and render videos.
• An ffmpeg skill you write in ten lines handles trims, joins and exports, and pulling still frames lets Claude check its own work.
• Planning and subtitle skills cover the parts around the edit, with a speech model doing the transcription.
• For realistic new footage, use a generative model and let Claude assemble the result.

If the hard part for you is getting a setup like this running at all, Taku mirrors AI apps and skills that someone already got working into a desktop workspace where you can run them, edit them and save them as your own. You can browse what's there in the Taku marketplace, including the video blueprint skill above. Taku is in Beta, and the Mac app is available now.