Remotion 4.0.536–537: a real editing timeline, then After Effects–style effects

Remotion shipped v4.0.536 on Oct 16 with what the notes call a 'new timeline experience'. It adds rolling edits for touching clips, interlocking transitions that use rolling-edit targets, editing text by double-clicking it in the preview, font previews on hover, and linear volume curves between keyframes. It also adds Interactive.create(), which makes your own components editable in Studio. The point of all this is the handoff. An agent writes the composition, you trim and nudge it on a timeline like any editor, and the changes go back into code the agent can keep working on.

v4.0.537 landed today, Oct 19, and grows @remotion/effects into something closer to an After Effects effects panel: cylinder() and sphere() projections, pageTurn() plus a Peel element, fractalNoise() for procedural textures, turbulentDisplace() for animated distortion, lensBlur() for camera defocus, and bevelAlpha() for raised text and shapes. According to the docs, effects work on canvas-based components such as video and @remotion/shapes. They stack in order, and you can add them three ways: in code (an effects array), by dragging them onto an element in Studio, or by asking an agent that has Remotion's skills installed. createEffect() lets you write your own in 2D Canvas, WebGL2 or WebGPU.

Smaller changes worth knowing: @remotion/captions gains parseVtt(), so existing subtitle files drop straight in. create-video can now install every skill in one go. The official skills gained Arabic and right-to-left text guidance and a rewrite of the editable-timeline guidance, and the 4.0.536 skills added colour-correction and LUT guidance. The render server now binds to localhost by default, a sensible security default if your agent starts renders on a shared machine.

Our take: before this, a plain code-to-video renderer needed a skill like claude-motion just to look polished. These effects bring that polish into Remotion itself, and the timeline makes the result fixable by hand. We haven't tested how well agents use the new effects without examples, so start by asking for one effect by name (for example 'lensBlur on the background video, rack focus at 2s'). Remotion still needs a paid company licence above a small team size, so check the terms before client work. Spotted, not tested. Credit Jonny Burger and contributors.