Open Edit

open-edit

You author the piece yourself, as an HTML page, and render it with render. OpenEdit supplies what a bare shell does not: VEED's hosted services on one login, measured tools for cutting and sound, and a renderer that re-renders only the stretch you changed. openedit below is short for npx @veedstudio/openedit-cli; every command explains its flags with --help.

Setup

Once per workspace, before the first command. WORKSPACE is the current project root, or the current directory outside a project.

npx --yes @veedstudio/openedit-cli init --dry --workspace "$WORKSPACE"
npx --yes @veedstudio/openedit-cli init --workspace "$WORKSPACE"

Read the final preflight: line, not the exit code: ready — OPEN_EDIT_ROOT=… means go, and runs/ and the recorded preferences live under that root. If init prints APPROVAL REQUIRED, tell the user every exact action and wait for an explicit yes, then run it again with --auto-approve. When the final line says the user runs the install commands, --auto-approve cannot run them: give the user those commands and run init again once they are done. Never install anything machine-global without that yes, and never infer it from the render request. When a command prints update available, tell the user once; run the init --update command it names only after they say yes, and if they decline, carry on without asking again.

One folder per piece

Keep everything a piece is made of under runs/<key>/: the page, its assets, renders, audio. The code is the edit: that folder is how the user comes back later to change one scene or reuse the piece for another video, so nothing it needs lives anywhere else.

Tools

Fabric, background removal, lipsync and veed-project reuse the VEED transcription login: same veed.io account, same stored token, no second sign-in. The editor hand-off's bookmarks run in the user's own VEED session in the browser. background-removal --fal needs no VEED login at all.

Render

openedit render runs/<key>/index.html --out runs/<key>/out.mp4 --fps <fps> --duration <seconds>

The canvas is the page's #stage (or [data-stage]) element, captured at its own size, else 1920x1080. --width/--height instead capture that much of the page from its top-left corner and ignore the stage. With footage, the canvas and frame rate are the source's own, and frames prints both. Pass its frameRate (such as 30000/1001) to --fps, never the decimal beside it.

• The renderer owns time. It drives a virtual clock (performance.now, Date.now, requestAnimationFrame, timers, a seeded Math.random), sets every CSS and Web Animations animation to the frame's time and seeks GSAP's global timeline. Anything else that moves with time goes in window.__seek(t) (it may be async).
• It waits for fonts, images and videos before the first frame, and shows each <video> at the exact frame. Keep fonts and assets as files beside the page.
• --from <s> --to <s> re-renders only that stretch and reuses the rest. After a change, re-render what changed, not the piece.
• --stills 0.5,2,4 --sheet <file> shows moments without a full render. --transparent gives alpha.
• It fails loudly on a page error, a blank render or a Chrome that did not start; read the reason it prints. A load it lists as failed (a video, an image, a font) is a wrong render: fix it and re-render before delivering.
• The output is silent: mux-audio lays the sound on (build a many-piece track first with mix-audio).

No footage

If the user attached no video, read the ask before assuming one is needed:

• A clip is coming: wait for it.
• A talking head from a script: Fabric, per FABRIC.md.
• A clip from another model (anything on fal, their key and their bill): say in the same breath that captions are transcribed from the clip's speech, and most generators return silent clips.
• No video at all: build from stills, graphics, generated imagery and audio. That is a whole run.

If it is unclear which, ask.

Money

• VEED transcription consumes the VEED transcription credits of one workspace. On an account with several, the CLI will not pick: name the one the user chose with --workspace.
• Fabric consumes the AI Playground credits of the workspace chosen for it; FABRIC.md has its three stops.
• Every fal call (fal run, lipsync, background-removal --fal or --fast) bills the user's own fal account. Before the first paid call, say in one line what you will make and what it costs, and let them answer. Background removal's default route is free.
• Report what was spent, and on which account, when you deliver.

Talking to the user

One line when you start, then the deliverable's path and a sentence or two on the result. No step-by-step progress and no internals: run keys, command names, raw tool output. Pass on in plain terms a warning about the result, such as words transcribed without timings. If you must stop, say in plain terms what is wrong on screen and what the options are.