OpenMontage setup, explained.

Transcript

OpenMontage turns your AI coding assistant into a full video production studio. Point it at a topic and it researches, writes the script, generates or sources visuals, edits, and renders a finished video, all from one plain English prompt. It just picked up eleven hundred forty four stars in a single day on GitHub's trending page, on top of more than fifty three thousand total. Here's how to set it up. Before you install anything, you need four things: Python three point ten or newer, FFmpeg, Node eighteen or newer, and an AI coding assistant like Claude Code or Cursor. That last one matters most. OpenMontage has no orchestrator of its own, your coding assistant reads the pipeline manifests and actually drives the whole thing. Installing it is three commands. Clone the repo, move into the folder, and run make setup. If you don't have make installed, there's a documented fallback: create a virtual environment, install the Python requirements, install the Remotion composer's Node dependencies, install Piper for offline text to speech, and copy the example env file. Once setup finishes, you don't run a command to make a video. You open the project folder in your AI coding assistant and just describe what you want, the same way you'd describe a feature to build. Something like: make a seventy five second documentary montage about city life in the rain, real footage only, no narration, elegiac tone, with music. The agent picks a pipeline, researches, scripts it, sources the footage, edits, and renders, checking its own work with ffprobe and audio analysis before you ever see the file. A few things before you rely on it. The license is AGPLv3, so private use is unrestricted, but running it as a service for other people triggers the copyleft clause. You genuinely need an AI coding assistant capable of multi-step tool use, this isn't a plain CLI. And the free tier, stock footage plus offline text to speech, covers real footage videos completely, but AI generated visuals eventually need a paid provider key. That's the setup.