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 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 in our opinion can be worked with.
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 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.
New renderMedia() API
A new function has been added to @remotion/renderer called renderMedia(). It combines already existing functions renderFrames() and stitchFramesToVideo() but takes advantage of the new parallel rendering pipeline. It can render videos as well as audio and requires fewer arguments, so it's a win for speed and ease of use!
New openBrowser() API
Config file can now import other files.
React 18 supported
React 18 is now supported and we recommend that you upgrade to it. See our React 18 upgrade guide on how to do it!
Node 14, ESLint 8
Keeping our stack modern allows us to move faster and also, eliminate dependencies. With Remotion 3.0, support for Node 12 is dropped, and we recommend you to upgrade to ESLint version 8.
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