1005: Programatic and Skill based Video Creation with Remotion

**Wes Bos** (0:00)
Welcome to Syntax. Today we have Jonny Burger on. He is the author of Remotion. And we had Jonny on, what, I don't know, probably three or four years ago to talk about Remotion, which is programmatically creating videos with code. And so stoked to see, I'm stoked to have him on again, because Jonny's been grinding on Remotion for many, many years. And in, I don't know, probably about January or so, this thing absolutely blew up, because there was a release of a Claude skill that allowed you to basically just, instead of writing the JavaScript and React code behind it, you could now simply just prompt your way through it. And it made it a lot easier. And it was probably one of the most impressive things, both to us developers, and it absolutely exploded the brains of people who were not developers, seeing that you could just type into a box and a video would come out the other end, which is really, really cool. So we're excited to talk to them about that, as well as the new Chrome spec, which is HTML in Canvas, which as soon as I saw this drop, I was like, this is going to be killer for doing, like basically making videos with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So welcome Jonny, thanks a lot for coming on.

**Jonny Burger** (1:22)
Hello, thanks a lot for having me on for the second time. That feels special.

**Wes Bos** (1:28)
Yeah, you're right. It's only a couple of people have been on more than once, so we're stoked to have you on. So do you want to give us a quick rundown for the six people who have not heard of Remotion, what it is and how it works?

**Jonny Burger** (1:41)
Sure. Remotion is a way to create videos programmatically. So you use React to essentially code a website, but then you also have this dimension of time, and you change the website over time, and through that you can render a video.
I've been doing that since 2021 Found a couple of people who like to use it, and for a couple of years we were all coding the videos manually. Now the latest craze is that the AI writes the code, and now it has become a lot more easier.

**Scott Tolinski** (2:21)
Yeah, and it seems like the longevity of the project is really great. It seems like you found a way to monetize it without turning people off. How did you come up with, was it Remotion Pro and the idea of being able to actually sustain this thing?

**Jonny Burger** (2:39)
Yeah, so essentially the idea has not changed since the very beginning, since 2021
I was in the situation where I already had a couple of open-source projects that I maintained, like some indie hacker projects, and I was also working part-time. And I really felt like taking on ownership of another project could stress me out. And I kind of sensed that this one could become more popular. And then I felt like if it becomes successful and all I get out of it is like issues and bug reports and stress, then I would not want that. And so I kind of put a clause in the license, which requires like the bigger companies to pay for that and for everybody else. It's free and it's been going great.
We've been able to sustain ourselves from that. We are now a team of three people. So yeah, a decision I do not regret and that I can also recommend to any other maintainer that they think about it before they launch the room.

**Scott Tolinski** (3:48)
I think you did a good job of doing this without pissing people off. It feels like so many monetization strategies really either don't work or make people angry. And I think you've found a nice balance of something that works. And I never hear anybody complaining about the monetization of this library.

**Jonny Burger** (4:04)
Yeah, I think I genuinely wanted to keep the open-source spirit, but find a way to make it sustainable. And I figured drawing this boundary at like four people, if you are an organization with four people, from then on you have to pay. I figured that makes sense because then you're probably in the situation where you are able to afford a small fee for that, especially this year has been exploding and we can hire more people with like a public GitHub repo. Yes, like incredible. I've not heard of any other projects been able to do that.

**Scott Tolinski** (4:39)
Yeah.

**Wes Bos** (4:41)
Let's talk a bit more about the like the cloud skills or the AI skills in order to make that. So if you're looking at like a NPM trends, it went from like 125,000 installs a day in like November, December up to almost 800,000 installs a day, right? Like it's grown absolutely crazy.