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Server-Side Rendering

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This documentation is how server-side rendering works in Remotion v3 and above. To see rendering in 2.0 and below, click here.

Remotion's rendering engine is built upon Node.JS, which makes it easy to render a video in the cloud.

Since Remotion is built with tech (Node.JS, FFMPEG, Puppeteer) that works well cross-platform, you can without much hassle run it on a Linux-based system or even dockerize your video.

Render a video on AWS Lambda​

The easiest and fastest way to render videos in the cloud is to use @remotion/lambda. Click here to read the documentation for it.

Render a video using Node.JS APIs​

The NPM package @remotion/renderer provides you with an API for rendering the videos programmatically. You can make a video in three steps: creating a Webpack bundle, rendering the frames, and stitching them together to an MP4. This gives you more independence and allows you to for example skip the stitching process, if you just want a PNG sequence.

Follow this commented example to see how to render a video:

tsx
import { bundle } from "@remotion/bundler";
import { getCompositions, renderMedia } from "@remotion/renderer";
 
const start = async () => {
  // The composition you want to render
  const compositionId = "HelloWorld";
 
  // Create a webpack bundle of the video.
  // You only have to do this once, you can reuse the bundle.
  const bundleLocation = await bundle(require.resolve("./src/index"));
 
  // Parametrize the video by passing arbitrary props to your component.
  const inputProps = {
    foo: "bar",
  };
 
  // Extract all the compositions you have defined in your project
  // from the webpack bundle.
  const comps = await getCompositions(bundleLocation, {
    // You can pass custom input props that you can retrieve using getInputProps()
    // in the composition list. Use this if you want to dynamically set the duration or
    // dimensions of the video.
    inputProps,
  });
 
  // Select the composition you want to render.
  const composition = comps.find((c) => c.id === compositionId);
 
  // Ensure the composition exists
  if (!composition) {
    throw new Error(`No composition with the ID ${compositionId} found`);
  }
 
  await renderMedia({
    composition,
    serveUrl: bundleLocation,
    codec: "h264",
    outputLocation: "out/video.mp4",
    inputProps,
  });
};
 
start();
tsx
import { bundle } from "@remotion/bundler";
import { getCompositions, renderMedia } from "@remotion/renderer";
 
const start = async () => {
  // The composition you want to render
  const compositionId = "HelloWorld";
 
  // Create a webpack bundle of the video.
  // You only have to do this once, you can reuse the bundle.
  const bundleLocation = await bundle(require.resolve("./src/index"));
 
  // Parametrize the video by passing arbitrary props to your component.
  const inputProps = {
    foo: "bar",
  };
 
  // Extract all the compositions you have defined in your project
  // from the webpack bundle.
  const comps = await getCompositions(bundleLocation, {
    // You can pass custom input props that you can retrieve using getInputProps()
    // in the composition list. Use this if you want to dynamically set the duration or
    // dimensions of the video.
    inputProps,
  });
 
  // Select the composition you want to render.
  const composition = comps.find((c) => c.id === compositionId);
 
  // Ensure the composition exists
  if (!composition) {
    throw new Error(`No composition with the ID ${compositionId} found`);
  }
 
  await renderMedia({
    composition,
    serveUrl: bundleLocation,
    codec: "h264",
    outputLocation: "out/video.mp4",
    inputProps,
  });
};
 
start();

This flow is highly customizable. Click on one of the SSR APIs to read about it's options:

Note that we only added a minimal example. For production, you should consider adding a queueing system and rate limiting.

Render using GitHub Actions​

The template includes a GitHub Actions workflow file under .github/workflows/render-video.yml. All you have to do is to adjust the props that your root component accepts in the workflow file and you can render a video right on GitHub.

  1. Commit the template to a GitHub repository
  2. On GitHub, click the 'Actions' tab.
  3. Select the 'Render video' workflow on the left.
  4. A 'Run workflow' button should appear. Click it
  5. Fill in the props of the root component and click 'Run workflow'.
  6. After the rendering is finished, you can download the video under 'Artifacts'.

Note that running the workflow may incur costs. However, the workflow will only run if you actively trigger it.

See also: Passing props in GitHub Actions

API reference​