# OpenMontage

> Turn a coding agent into a video production studio

- Category: Multimodal Generation / Video Generation
- Language: Python
- Licence: AGPL-3.0
- Repository: https://github.com/calesthio/OpenMontage
- Website: https://www.openmontage.video/
- Canonical page: https://ai-tldr.dev/tools/openmontage/
- Updated: 2026-06-22

## In short

OpenMontage turns an AI coding assistant into a video production system. It sits in the Video Generation category of the Multimodal Generation tools and is open-source, written in Python and licensed AGPL-3.0. To get started: clone and set up.

## Overview

OpenMontage turns an AI coding assistant into a video production system. Instead of a fixed orchestrator, the agent itself drives the work: the repository supplies executable capabilities (tools and pipeline definitions), operational guidance (skills that teach OpenMontage's conventions) and technical knowledge (provider documentation), and the assistant reads them to plan and execute a production from a plain-English brief such as "make a 60-second animated explainer about how neural networks learn".

Twelve pipelines cover animated explainers, motion graphics, avatar spokespeople, cinematic edits, batch short-form clipping, documentary montage from open archives, hybrid footage, localisation and dubbing, podcast repurposing, screen demos, talking heads and SVG character animation. Each runs the same seven stages — research, proposal, script, scene plan, assets, edit, compose — with human approval gates at the proposal, script, scene-plan, asset and publish steps, plus pre-compose validation and a post-render self-review that inspects the output with ffprobe and frame extraction.

Generation is provider-pluggable: video through Kling, Runway Gen-4, Veo 3.1, MiniMax, Seedance and local WAN 2.2 or Hunyuan; images through FLUX, Imagen, Grok Imagine, GPT Image 2 and Recraft; speech through ElevenLabs, Google TTS, OpenAI TTS and local Piper. Composition happens in Remotion (React) or HyperFrames (HTML/GSAP). A zero-key path exists — Piper for narration, Archive.org, NASA, Wikimedia Commons, Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay for media, Remotion or HyperFrames plus FFmpeg for assembly — and paid providers run under cost estimation, a configurable spend cap and a per-action approval threshold.

## What it does

- Twelve production pipelines that all follow a research → proposal → script → scene plan → assets → edit → compose flow
- Human approval gates at proposal, script, scene plan, asset and publish, with pre-compose validation and post-render self-review
- Pluggable generation providers for video, image, speech and music, plus local options that need no API key
- Two composition engines: Remotion for React-based rendering and HyperFrames for HTML/GSAP kinetic typography and SVG character rigs
- Budget controls — cost estimates before execution, spend caps, and track-only, warn or hard-limit modes
- Ships assistant-specific configuration for Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex and Windsurf over shared AGENT_GUIDE.md and PROJECT_CONTEXT.md

## Getting started

OpenMontage is a repository you clone and then open in your AI coding assistant. It needs Python 3.10+, FFmpeg, Node.js 18+ and one of the supported assistants.

1. Clone and set up

   `make setup` creates the virtualenv, installs Python dependencies, installs the Remotion composer's npm packages, adds Piper TTS and copies the example environment file.

```bash
git clone https://github.com/calesthio/OpenMontage.git
cd OpenMontage
make setup
```

2. Set up without make

   The same steps, spelled out, for machines without `make`.

```bash
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && python -m pip install -r requirements.txt && cd remotion-composer && npm install && cd .. && python -m pip install piper-tts && cp .env.example .env
```

3. Brief the agent

   Open the project folder in Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf or Codex — each has its own instructions file in the repo — and describe the video you want. The agent picks a pipeline and walks the stages, stopping at the approval gates.

```text
Make a 60-second animated explainer about how neural networks learn
```

## When to use it

- Produce an explainer or short-form video end to end from a written brief instead of a timeline
- Batch-extract vertical clips from a long recording with a repeatable pipeline
- Build videos with no paid API keys using Piper, open archives and FFmpeg
- Keep generation spend bounded when a run touches several paid media providers

## Version history

- 2026-06-22: OpenMontage launched publicly as an open-source agentic video production system, billing itself as a way to turn Claude Code, Codex or any AI coding assistant into a full video studio.