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Re: I would NOT use Airtable for that - "video editing" edition

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Greg_F
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

Hi there,

Probably many of you experience this situation when after getting good grasp of Airtable, you end up using it progressively for ... everything.  Even when people tell you there are better tools, you should use instead.

Background

There is a great React project Remotion, which I wanted to try for a while. At the same time I also wanted to generate some shorts for my YT channel.  To little surprise, I ended up using Airtable as a backend.  

What it does

I ended up with a tool that creates video out of template + content defined inside Airtable. Here is example of video:

How it works

Here is a demo base I used for above: https://airtable.com/shryu85CEPUD2IHX4
Each row in Airtable is converted into a video layer with start, duration, media (image, video, audio), text and animation&styling.

To render it as a video at the moment (this is still WIP) you need to start the project on your local machine, connect your Airtable with PAT token and render locally on your PC.

The code is available on GitHub Rewind Table   with more instructions how to start it. My code is MIT (but do note that Remotion, free for smaller teams, has license for commercial uses) .

You can also play around with the page below - it will render the video in an online Player.

https://rewindtable.com/

Final notes
While this project could be used without coding experience, the local set up might get tricky. I am looking if I can get it to completely run in the cloud. 

The styling is done using ... Tailwind CSS  while this is simplest way to do things in CSS, it is still CSS. Here is a Playground that allows to experiment with styling.

Animations - there are a few animations predefined in the sample base. They can be copied and customized and composed together. They are implementation of this well documented library Remotion Animated.

 

 

If anyone tries above out and runs into some issues, let me know!

Also if you know a proper commercial tool that could make vids out of Airtable content, let me know  🤣

 

2 Replies 2
SueFaber
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Thanks for sharing your experience with using Airtable for video editing. It's interesting to see how you've customized it to suit your needs. However, if you're looking for more specialized video editing tools, there are alternatives available. If you're interested in adding background music to your videos, this website has a helpful guide on how to do that. You can check it out at https://www.movavi.com/support/how-to/how-to-add-background-music-to-video.html. While Airtable may work for certain video editing tasks, using dedicated video editing software can provide you with more advanced features and flexibility.

@SueFaber  I  wanted to build  some automated  pipeline to help me produce YT  shorts at scale. So that was my go at it.  While it works, adjusting timelines purely via Airtable is not most optimal.   Above  solution  works for identical templates for sure, but I have to admit I have produced a few recent shorts for my channel using Tiktok editor...😂