Video Explainer Skill for Claude
Turn a research brief or finished script into a reviewed, narrated, rendered, and verified vertical explainer video. Use when an agent must create a short 9:16 explainer, run a no-key local demo, enforce a pre-render review gate, diagnose the video toolchain, or verify a generated MP4 before any manual publication step.
Install
one command, takes just this skill from the repositorynpx skills add https://github.com/runesleo/claude-video-kit --skill video-explainerWhat comes with it
6 332 bytes besides the instructionThe instruction itself
5 sections, as written by the authorVideo Explainer
Version note: v0.3.0-rc.1 / 2026-07-22 / Add the first guarded brief-to-video workflow with script-bound review receipts, a no-key demo path, and local verification. Keep upload, account access, credentials, private voice assets, and hosted rendering out of scope. Rollback: remove this skill and continue using the legacy scripts directly.
Produce a local video and evidence packet. Never upload or publish from this skill.
Install
This Skill orchestrates a local clone of claude-video-kit; it does not bundle the renderer. From the repository root, install the runtime and register the Skill with:
npm ci --prefix remotion
npx skills add runesleo/claude-video-kit --skill video-explainer
For repository development, run commands from the repository root.
Workflow
- Run the read-only doctor before changing a project:
node scripts/video-explainer.mjs doctor --output <output-directory>
Read setup-and-doctor.md when doctor blocks or the environment is new.
- Convert the brief into
script.json. Keep claims traceable, use supported slide types, and target 9:16. Read brief-to-script.md for the input/output contract.
- Require an independent review. Write
review-input.json, then run:
node scripts/video-explainer.mjs review <project> --input <project>/review-input.json
Read review-gate.md for the six required checks. If any check is fix or block, revise and review again. Never render from that receipt.
- Render only after a current pass receipt:
node scripts/video-explainer.mjs render <project>
On macOS, use --demo-quality only for a credential-free first success. It forces the built-in say voice and script-timed captions; label the result as demo-quality. Read render-and-verify.md before running a custom project.
- Verify the MP4 locally and report the video path, review receipt, verification result, elapsed time, and known limitations. Do not claim publication quality from the fallback voice.
Canonical first success
Run the repository-owned neutral demo:
node scripts/video-explainer.mjs demo --output /tmp/video-explainer-first-success
The demo must create a current pass receipt before TTS, render locally without an API key on supported macOS, and run the shorts verifier. It must not read an account, upload media, or send the brief to a remote service.
Stop conditions
- Stop before TTS/render when review is missing, stale,
fix, orblock. - Stop when doctor reports a required runtime missing; give its exact action.
- Stop before any upload, public post, deploy, paid API call, credential setup, or account action and return that boundary to the user.
- Read errors-and-privacy.md for recovery and data-handling rules.
Other skills for the same job
different authors, same section of the catalogue
Create beautiful visual art in .png and .pdf documents using design philosophy. You should use this skill when the user asks to create a poster, piece of art, design, or other static piece. Create original visual designs, never copying existing artists' work to avoid copyright violations.
Creating algorithmic art using p5.js with seeded randomness and interactive parameter exploration. Use this when users request creating art using code, generative art, algorithmic art, flow fields, or particle systems. Create original algorithmic art rather than copying existing artists' work to avoid copyright violations.
Improves the quality of images, especially screenshots, by enhancing resolution, sharpness, and clarity. Perfect for preparing images for presentations, documentation, or social media posts.
Downloads videos from YouTube and other platforms for offline viewing, editing, or archival. Handles various formats and quality options.
Lightweight WSI tile extraction and preprocessing. Use for basic slide processing tissue detection, tile extraction, stain normalization for H&E images. Best for simple pipelines, dataset preparation, quick tile-based analysis. For advanced spatial proteomics, multiplexed imaging, or deep learning pipelines use pathml.
Microscopy data management platform. Access images via Python, retrieve datasets, analyze pixels, manage ROIs/annotations, batch processing, for high-content screening and microscopy workflows.
Python library for working with DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) files. Use this skill when reading, writing, or modifying medical imaging data in DICOM format, extracting pixel data from medical images (CT, MRI, X-ray, ultrasound), anonymizing DICOM files, working with DICOM metadata and tags, converting DICOM images to other formats, handling compressed DICOM data, or processing medical imaging datasets. Applies to tasks involving medical image analysis, PACS systems, radiology workflows, and healthcare imaging applications.
This skill should be used when working with pre-trained transformer models for natural language processing, computer vision, audio, or multimodal tasks. Use for text generation, classification, question answering, translation, summarization, image classification, object detection, speech recognition, and fine-tuning models on custom datasets.
How to use it
Take runesleo/video-explainer from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.
The instructions reference npx.
Without those the skill loads but fails at the first command.