Remotion 4.0.540: WebGPU for every effect, film burn and weather

What's new. Every effect in @remotion/effects now has a WebGPU backend. The release added WebGL2 and WebGPU to 38 effects and WebGPU to the other 49, and a preferred-effect-backend option lets you choose which one runs. New weather, film-burn and wipe effects joined the library. In @remotion/transitions the cube() presentation is now free to use. @remotion/web-renderer gained renderFramesOnWeb() for rendering several still frames in one call, which is handy for thumbnails, storyboards and contact sheets.

Under the hood. The renderer now ships Chrome 158 (with its build scripts published), the bundler moved to Rspack 2.3, and Mediabunny went to 1.64. Several fixes target the effects stack: canvas effects recover after a WebGL context loss, WebGL state no longer leaks between effects, and Chromium no longer crashes during effect cleanup. Long OffthreadVideo renders on Chrome 158 are fixed, and Sequence has less per-frame overhead. Studio adds timeline previews for animated images and GIFs, plus a custom playback-rate control.

For agent workflows. The official remotion-dev/skills repo got a template update the same night (Nov 2, 1:50 AM MST). If Claude Code or another agent builds your Remotion projects, update the skills along with the packages so it knows about the new effects and backend option.

Our take: WebGPU effects, the stacked WebGL fixes and HyperFrames' WebGL-context fixes the same weekend all point to the same thing. Both code-to-video engines are hardening GPU effects for long, unattended renders, which is exactly how agents use them. The free cube() and the film-burn and weather looks are easy wins for social cuts.