remotion-excalidraw-tts

What This Skill Does

The remotion-excalidraw-tts skill is a powerful automation tool designed to bridge the gap between static architectural diagrams and dynamic, narrated explainer videos. By combining the Excalidraw file format with text-to-speech (TTS) engines and Remotion's programmatic video rendering capabilities, this skill creates high-quality, professional-looking MP4 presentations locally on your machine.

It functions by orchestrating a local rendering pipeline: first, it parses your Excalidraw JSON file; then, it processes your voiceover script using either native macOS synthesis or premium cloud APIs like OpenAI and ElevenLabs. Finally, it composes a video project in a temporary workspace, applies camera movements, zooms, and focus highlights defined in a storyboard, and outputs a rendered video file.

Installation

To install this skill, run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/jack4world/remotion-excalidraw-tts

Ensure you have the following prerequisites installed on your system:

• macOS operating system (required for native 'say' TTS)
• ffmpeg and ffprobe for audio/video processing
• Node.js and npm (the script automates project initialization)

Use Cases

• Technical Documentation: Turn architectural diagrams into walkthrough videos for your development team or project stakeholders.
• Educational Content: Create engaging whiteboard-style explainers for tutorials or blog posts, where the narrator highlights specific parts of the diagram in sync with the audio.
• Product Demos: Visualize complex system flows or user journeys by panning through diagrams as you describe the features of a product.
• Automated Reporting: Generate recurring status update videos where your system architecture is updated and re-rendered with a new voiceover.

Example Prompts

1. "Use the diagram in /projects/flow.excalidraw and the text in /projects/script.txt to create an explainer video, saving it to /outputs/final.mp4."
2. "Create a video from my excalidraw file using the OpenAI 'alloy' voice for the narration, and use the storyboard.json file for camera movements."
3. "Generate an explainer video based on my architecture diagram, ensuring the focus highlight is on the API gateway section defined in my storyboard."

Tips & Limitations

• Focusing: For best results, use a storyboard.json file. Manually specifying cameraTo coordinates ensures your viewers are looking exactly where you want them to be while you are speaking.
• TTS Selection: Use the native say command for quick, offline drafts. Switch to openai or elevenlabs backends for higher-quality, more natural-sounding narration in public-facing videos.
• File Paths: Always provide absolute paths for the diagram, script, and output files to prevent issues with the temporary build environment.
• Environment: This skill requires a macOS environment to leverage the default say engine, though cloud-based TTS options allow for broader flexibility.