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Remotion 3.0

· 5 min read
Jonny Burger

After more than 10 months in development and 1400 commits, it feels so good to announce Remotion 3.0!

I am convinced that Remotion Lambda is the best piece of software that I have ever written. It is the final puzzle piece needed to complete our vision: A full stack for developing video apps! Enjoy the changelog, and if you haven't, check out the Remotion 3.0 Trailer.

Announcing Remotion Lambda​

Remotion Lambda is a distributed video renderer based on AWS Lambda. It is made for self-hosting, so you deploy it to your AWS account. Once your Lambda function is up, you can give it rendering tasks, which it will split up into many small units of work that get processed in parallel by spawning itself many times.

Lambda is the best of all worlds:

  • Fast: Lambda can render a video up to many times faster than the fastest consumer computers. The longer the video, the higher the speed gain. The Remotion Lambda trailer was rendered in 15 seconds instead of 60 seconds, and a 2 hour video was rendered in just 12 minutes[1].

  • Cheap: You only pay for when you are rendering. The Lambda functions use ARM architecture for best price-performance efficiency.

  • Scalable: You can render many multiple videos at the same time. Lambda concurrency limits apply, but can be increased.

  • Easy: Chromium and FFMPEG are already pre-installed, and we handled all the edge cases. You only need to code your video, follow the steps to deploy a function and invoke a render.

All functionality is available via CLI commands and Node.JS functions. We've written 45 pages of documentation, released over 50 alpha versions to testers, and written many tests from unit to end-to-end. Lambda is mature and used in production by companies like Combo and Jupitrr.

Parallel rendering and encoding​

Previously, rendering frames, and stitching them together to a video has been a sequential process where one step can start once the other has finished. In Remotion 3.0, stitching can start while rendering is still in progress! This will result on average in a 10-15% speedup.

Additionally, downloading audio assets now happens earlier in the rendering pipeline and if you rely on remote audio, you should see a handsome speedup as well.