@hyperframes/producer

Full HTML-to-video rendering pipeline: capture frames with Chrome's BeginFrame API, encode with FFmpeg, mix audio — all in one call.

Install

npm install @hyperframes/producer

Requirements: Node.js >= 22, Chrome/Chromium (auto-downloaded), FFmpeg

Usage

Render a video

import { createRenderJob, executeRenderJob } from "@hyperframes/producer";

const job = createRenderJob({
  fps: 30,
  quality: "standard",
});

await executeRenderJob(job, "./my-project", "./output.mp4", (currentJob) => {
  console.log(`${Math.round(currentJob.progress)}%`);
});

Run as an HTTP server

The producer can also run as a render server, accepting render requests over HTTP:

import { startServer } from "@hyperframes/producer";

await startServer({ port: 8080 });
// POST /render or /render/stream with projectDir, html, or previewUrl (public HTTPS only) and render options

Both HTTP routes accept optional pageMotionBlur: "off" to disable authored page motion blur. Omit it to preserve the composition's behavior. Other explicit values are rejected before a render starts. This is separate from engine sub-frame motionBlur sampling.

Configuration

RenderConfig controls the render pipeline:

| Option | Default | Description | | ------------------- | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | entryFile | index.html | Entry composition inside the project directory. Its authored dimensions set the canvas size. | | fps | required | Frame rate as an integer or exact { num, den } rational. | | quality | required | Encoder preset ("draft", "standard", "high"). | | pageMotionBlur | authored setting | Set "off" to disable page motion blur; omit to preserve authored behavior. | | format | "mp4" | Output container — "mp4", "webm", "mov", "gif", "png-sequence", or "hls". See Transparent Video Output and HLS Output below. | | hlsSegmentSeconds | 4 | HLS target segment length in whole seconds. Ignored for every other format. | | videoFrameFormat | "auto" | Source video frame extraction format — "auto", "jpg", or "png". Use "png" for UI recordings, screen captures, and color-sensitive source videos. |

Transparent Video Output

The producer can render HTML compositions to formats that carry a true alpha channel — not chroma key. The same composition that renders an opaque MP4 renders a layerable overlay when you set format.

| format | Codec / pixel format | Alpha | Audio | Use case | | ----------------- | --------------------------------- | ------------------ | ------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | "mp4" (default) | H.264 (yuv420p) or H.265 + HDR10 | No | AAC | Streaming, social, default deliverable | | "webm" | VP9 + yuva420p | True alpha | Opus | Web playback as overlay (<video> over background); supported in Chrome, Edge, Firefox | | "mov" | ProRes 4444 + yuva444p10le | True alpha | AAC | Editor ingest (Premiere, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve) | | "png-sequence" | Numbered RGBA PNGs in a directory | Lossless alpha | Sidecar audio.m4a | After Effects / Nuke / Fusion, or pipelines that post-process frames before encoding | | "hls" | H.264 (yuv420p) in MPEG-TS | No | AAC rendition | VOD streaming — see HLS Output |

Example

import { createRenderJob, executeRenderJob } from "@hyperframes/producer";

const job = createRenderJob({
  fps: 30,
  quality: "standard",
  format: "webm", // "mp4" | "webm" | "mov" | "png-sequence"
});

await executeRenderJob(job, "./my-project", "./output.webm");

What "transparent background" means here

The producer captures Chrome screenshots with the page background forced transparent (html, body, [data-composition-id] { background: transparent !important }) and the CDP default background override set to RGBA 0,0,0,0. The captured PNGs carry a real alpha channel and that channel is preserved end-to-end:

• VP9 (webm) is encoded with -pix_fmt yuva420p, -auto-alt-ref 0, -cpu-used 4 by default, and alpha_mode=1 metadata. Tune the speed/quality tradeoff with PRODUCER_VP9_CPU_USED (-8 to 8) or local CLI --vp9-cpu-used.
• ProRes 4444 (mov) uses -pix_fmt yuva444p10le and carries a separate alpha plane. Chrome's RGBA capture, including alpha, is 8 bits per channel; the 10-bit pixel format adds no capture precision.
• PNG sequences are written without re-encoding (zero-padded frame_NNNNNN.png).

This is not chroma keying. There is no green/blue background to remove and no "key" tolerance to tune — pixels that were transparent in the browser are transparent in the output.

Caveats

• Linux + alpha forces screenshot capture. Chrome's BeginFrame compositor (the default deterministic capture path on Linux headless-shell) does not preserve alpha; the orchestrator falls back to Page.captureScreenshot, which is slower per frame. macOS and Windows already use screenshot mode by default, so they are unaffected.
• HDR + alpha is not supported. Setting hdr: true together with an alpha-capable format logs a warning and falls back to SDR. Use format: "mp4" for HDR10 output.
• png-sequence does not produce a single muxed file. When the composition contains audio elements, an audio.m4a sidecar is written alongside the PNGs in outputPath.
• Safari + WebM alpha is incomplete. For broad browser playback of an alpha video, ship format: "mov" to your editor and re-encode for the codec your distribution target supports.

Authoring transparent compositions

Don't paint a fullscreen background in your HTML. The default body background is overridden to transparent automatically — any body { background: ... }, #root { background: ... }, or [data-composition-id] { background: ... } rule is force-overridden during alpha rendering. Backgrounds on inner elements (cards, scenes, components) are kept.

HLS Output

format: "hls" packages the same H.264 + AAC encode as mp4 as an HLS VOD stream. outputPath is a directory:

master.m3u8      # references both renditions
video.m3u8       # video media playlist
video_00000.ts   # MPEG-TS segments, one IDR frame at the start of each
audio.m3u8       # written only when the composition has audio
audio_00000.ts

const job = createRenderJob({
  fps: 30,
  quality: "standard",
  format: "hls",
  hlsSegmentSeconds: 4,
});
await executeRenderJob(job, "./my-project", "./renders/stream");

Segments are exactly hlsSegmentSeconds long except the last: the encoder's GOP is locked to round(fps × hlsSegmentSeconds) frames so the packaging pass can stream-copy (-c copy) and still cut on keyframes. There is no second encode.

Constraints:

• SDR only. hdrMode: "force-hdr" is rejected; HDR10 would need fMP4 segments and HEVC. Use format: "mp4" for HDR.
• Software encoder only. useGpu: true is rejected — GPU encoders ignore the forced-keyframe lock that fixed-length segments depend on.
• Not available in distributed rendering, including Lambda and Cloud Run.
• MPEG-TS carries no mov-family metadata, so the render provenance tags written into MP4 output are absent.

Distributed rendering

For renders too large for a single machine, the producer ships a public set of distributed-render primitives. They are pure functions over local file paths — networking and orchestration live in adapter packages (Temporal, AWS Lambda + Step Functions, Cloud Run Jobs, K8s Jobs).

Plan v2 is recommended for new integrations. It publishes an immutable manifest plus content-addressed artifacts and materializes only each worker's declared dependencies:

import { planV2, renderChunkV2, assembleV2 } from "@hyperframes/producer/distributed";

// Controller-side: produce a v2 manifest + local content-addressed store.
const planResult = await planV2(
  projectDir,
  { fps: 30, width: 1920, height: 1080, format: "mp4" },
  "/tmp/plan-v2",
);

const chunk = await renderChunkV2("/tmp/plan-v2", 0, "/tmp/chunks/0.mp4");

// Controller-side: stitch chunks into the final deliverable.
await assembleV2("/tmp/plan-v2", ["/tmp/chunks/0.mp4", "/tmp/chunks/1.mp4"], "/tmp/output.mp4");

Cloud adapters should use planV2WithPublisher() so artifacts publish directly to object storage. The legacy plan() / renderChunk() / assemble() v1 layout remains supported, and cloud SDKs still interpret an omitted protocol as v1 for backwards compatibility.

The activity functions plus their result types are also re-exported from @hyperframes/producer so callers that pin the main package don't need a separate subpath import. Supported formats: mp4 SDR, mov ProRes 4444, and png-sequence. webm and HDR mp4 trip a typed FormatNotSupportedInDistributedError — use the in-process renderer (executeRenderJob) for those.

How it works

1. Serve — spins up a local file server for the HTML composition
2. Capture — opens the page in headless Chrome, seeks frame-by-frame via HeadlessExperimental.beginFrame (or Page.captureScreenshot for transparent / non-Linux renders), captures screenshots
3. Encode — pipes frames through FFmpeg (with GPU encoder detection and chunked concat). Skipped for format: "png-sequence".
4. Mix — extracts <audio> elements and mixes them into the final video. For png-sequence, audio is written as an audio.m4a sidecar.
5. Finalize — applies faststart for streaming-friendly MP4 (no-op for WebM, MOV, and png-sequence). For hls, stream-copies the encode into playlists and MPEG-TS segments instead.

Where each step lives

executeRenderJob in src/services/renderOrchestrator.ts runs the stages in src/services/render/stages/, in this order:

• compileStage.ts, probeStage.ts, extractVideosStage.ts, audioStage.ts
• src/services/render/captureCost.ts sizes the worker count (runCaptureCalibration, then resolveRenderWorkerCount)
• createCapturePlan in src/services/render/capturePlan.ts picks the capture kind: streaming, disk, segmented or HDR layered
• capture: captureStreamingStage.ts, captureSegmentedStage.ts and captureHdrStage.ts encode as they capture; disk capture (captureStage.ts) encodes afterwards in encodeStage.ts
• assembleStage.ts, except for PNG sequences and GIF, which are written directly

The job's producerConfig is used when present; otherwise resolveConfig in packages/engine/src/config.ts builds it. Capture, encoding and browser primitives are engine services (see packages/engine/README.md).

Documentation

Full documentation: hyperframes.heygen.com/packages/producer

Related packages

• @hyperframes/core — types, parsers, frame adapters
• @hyperframes/engine — lower-level capture and encode primitives
• hyperframes — CLI