Remotion

Our verdict on Remotion

Remotion is the tool that made "video editing as code" real for us. Paired with Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, it let Sam, who has no editing skills, build a tool that turns interview videos into branded reels, and Jordan uses it for every new feature trailer.

The weak spot is speed. Rendering a short reel still takes five to ten minutes. Jordan's view in March 2026 was that it is early days, and that the videos will get better as Remotion and our prompts improve.

What we built with Remotion

• Candidate highlight reel builder (Episode 36): a recruiter drops in an EntreVista AI interview video, pastes the transcript, and AI picks nine clips across English communication, role fit, and personality and drive. The recruiter trims about three clips on a waveform, picks an aspect ratio and renders a branded reel, shared through an Amazon S3 link. The demo reel ran 43 seconds. Before this, our video editors took hours or days per reel.
• Product feature trailers: when Jordan ships a feature, he makes a Remotion trailer over a track from our royalty-free library, using the music's wave file so cuts land on the beat.
• A deck turned into a video: Jordan converted a 65-page slide deck into a narrated video with Remotion and ElevenLabs text to speech.

Yeah. So when I build, like, a new product feature, I've been trying to make, like, Remotion video trailers, so that's been really cool and been pretty effective.

— Jordan Metzner, Episode 36

How we use Remotion

1. Start from a repeatable asset. Remotion pays off when you have lots of similar source material. For Sam it was AI interview videos and their transcripts.
2. Plug Remotion into your coding agent. Sam said he started in Claude Code and built mainly in Codex, and called the setup "really, really simple."
3. Let AI pick the content, and a person pick the cut. The transcript goes to AI to find candidate clips. Sam added a waveform editor so recruiters can trim clips so they don't end mid-word.
4. Keep it short. Three clips of about fifteen seconds each, under a minute total.
5. Style the template in plain language. Sam described colors and how graphics should appear, and the agent built the template. No editing software involved.
6. Preview before you render. His tool previews graphics and audio without rendering the video, to check that it flows.
7. Choose the format for where it's going. About 90 percent of reels go in emails, so a horizontal format is the default.
8. Render and share a link. Plan for five to ten minutes per render, then send the hosted link.
9. Use the beat for music videos. For trailers, Jordan feeds in the wave file of the track so the visuals hit with the music.

There was absolutely zero editing skills, but just like, you know, playing around with the colors and how I wanted the graphics to to be presented just in natural language, he was able to take that and and help me build this template.

— Sam Nadler, Episode 36

Where Remotion falls short

• Render time. Sam called getting renders to a reasonable time the hardest part of the build, and five to ten minutes is "not that fast." It still beats hours or days with an editor.
• It needs code. Jordan said that before AI, writing out a video in JavaScript would have been "pretty cumbersome." Without a coding agent, this is a developer tool.
• Early days. Jordan expects the output to improve as Remotion and prompts improve. Today's reels are "not fancy," in Sam's words.
• Little competition to compare. Jordan noted there isn't much else like it, so we have no head-to-head to offer.

How Remotion fits our other video tools

Remotion is for structured, repeatable edits of footage you already have. For generating new footage from a prompt we use models like Google Veo, Sora and Seedance, which we compare in Sora vs Google Veo. Jordan first saw Remotion in the early vibe coding days of Lovable and Bolt, when someone was using it as a video editor.

Episodes featuring Remotion

• Episode 36: Sam's highlight reel builder, then Jordan on what Remotion is and how he uses it.

FAQ

What is Remotion?

Jordan describes it as a JavaScript video library. You build videos in React code, and it also includes a player and an editor you can build into your own app.

Can you use Remotion without knowing how to code?

With an AI coding tool, yes. Sam has zero editing skills and never writes code himself; he plugged Remotion into Claude Code and Codex and shaped the template by describing colors and graphics in plain language.

How long does Remotion take to render?

In Sam's highlight reel builder, a branded reel under a minute long takes about five to ten minutes to render. Getting render time down was the hardest part of the build.

What can you make with Remotion?

We have made candidate highlight reels from interview videos, product feature trailers synced to music, and a narrated video from a 65-page slide deck with ElevenLabs voice. Jordan has also seen people use it for automated documentation videos.