Project Structure

Revideo projects are structured similar to most Typescript projects. Here is the structure of the default project that gets initialized when you run npm init @revideo@latest:

my-project/
├── package.json
├── package-lock.json
├── tsconfig.json
├── vite.config.ts
├── src/
│   ├── project.ts
│   ├── render.ts
│   ├── project.meta
│   └── scenes/
│       └── example.tsx
└── public/
    └── my-video.mp4

Let's walk through the most relevant files:

./src/scenes/example.tsx​

Files inside the ./src/scenes folder such as example.tsx are the ones you'll modify the most in order to define video templates. Scenes describe how your video should look like. They need to specify a default export that calls makeScene2D on a generator function describing what the desired video should look like:

import {Video, makeScene2D} from '@revideo/2d';
import {waitFor} from '@revideo/core';

export default makeScene2D(function* (view) {
  const videoFile = useScene().variables.get(
    'video',
    'https://revideo-example-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/stars.mp4',
  )();

  yield view.add(<Video src={videoFile} size={['100%', '100%']} play={true} />);

  yield* waitFor(10);
});

./src/project.ts​

Your project file does two things:

1. It defines an array of scenes to create a full video

2. It accepts video variables that will be passed to your video when you look at it in the visual editor (when you run npm start)

import {makeProject} from '@revideo/core';

import example from './scenes/example?scene';
import example2 from './scenes/example2?scene';

export default makeProject({
  scenes: [example, example2],
  variables: {
    video: 'https://revideo-example-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/beach.mp4',
  },
});

When specifying multiple scenes, the scenes will be played after another. You can also add transitions between them. A new scene will not inherit any nodes from an old scene. This can have a positive influence on performance, especially when your scene is very bloated (as it contains a lot of nodes). In this case, recalculating the scene (for instance when navigating to a new time in the player) can be an expensive operation and is faster when you have multiple smaller scenes instead.

However, in most cases, it is not necessary to use multiple scenes. For logical seperation, you can instead define generator function outside of your main generator function in makeScene2D and call them there.

vite.config.ts​

Revideo projects are served using vite. The vite.config.ts file specifically configures the server used to serve the visual editor you see when running npm start inside your project. The default config looks as follows:

import {defineConfig} from 'vite';
import motionCanvas from '@revideo/vite-plugin';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [motionCanvas()],
});

As you can see, the default settings are sufficient, and the only thing we modify is using the 'motionCanvas' plugin. This plugin enables Motion Canvas / Revideo-related functionality, such as communication between the browser in which the HTML canvas is rendered and drawn to, and a "backend" process running ffmpeg for audio processing.

You can modify some settings of the motion canvas plugin, for instance to point to another project file than the default project.ts, or to select another output folder than the default ./output. You can also modify some vite server settings here, for instance on which port your application is served:

import {defineConfig} from 'vite';
import motionCanvas from '@revideo/vite-plugin';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    motionCanvas({
      output: './other-output-folder',
      project: './src/project2.ts',
    }),
  ],
  server: {
    port: 5000,
  },
});

./src/render.ts​

This file contains code to render your video. By default, you can execute its code by running npm run render (assuming that you bootstrapped your project using npm init @revideo@latest). Note that the renderVideo() function accepts variables of its own and does not use the ones from ./src/project.ts.

import {renderVideo} from '@revideo/renderer';

async function render() {
    console.log('Rendering video...');

    // This is the main function that renders the video
    const file = await renderVideo({
        projectFile: './src/project.ts',
        variables: { video: "" }
        settings: { logProgress: true }
    });

    console.log(`Rendered video to ${file}`);
}

render();

This code is not neccessary to start the editor or your project and is not tied to any other rendering functionality (like the renderer of the development server from npx revideo serve). You can safely remove it if you don't need it.

Files in /public​

If you want to work with local files, you can put them into the /public folder. You can then access them inside your scene via their name:

import {Video, makeScene2D} from '@revideo/2d';
import {waitFor} from '@revideo/core';

export default makeScene2D(function* (view) {
  yield view.add(
    <Video src={'/my-video.mp4'} size={['100%', '100%']} play={true} />,
  );

  yield* waitFor(10);
});