Open Montage

Open Montage — Agentic Video Production

Describe your video idea. The agent orchestrates the entire production pipeline: research, scripting, asset generation, editing, and final render.

When to Use This Skill

• "Make a 60-second explainer about quantum computing"
• "Create a cinematic trailer for our product launch"
• "Produce an animated video in Ghibli style"
• "Turn this podcast episode into video highlights"
• "Create an avatar spokesperson video"
• "Make a screen demo of our app"
• Any video production from natural language description

When Not to Use

• For an audience-targeted explainer of the current codebase with local GPU footage — use codebase-video.
• For a written docs bundle or an instructional microsite (no standalone video requested) — use explainer.
• For simple image generation — use art (Nano Banana 2) or comfyui
• For video transcoding/editing only — use ffmpeg-processing
• For academic diagrams — use paperbanana
• For 3D modelling/rendering — use blender
• For 3D Gaussian Splatting — use lichtfeld-studio

Architecture

User: "Make a 45-second explainer about black holes"
  │
  ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│  Open Montage Dispatcher        │
│  (this skill — reads manifests) │
└──────────────┬──────────────────┘
               │ Selects pipeline
               ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│  Pipeline Manifest (YAML)       │
│  e.g. animated-explainer.yaml   │
│  Defines: stages, tools, order  │
└──────────────┬──────────────────┘
               │ Agent executes stages
               ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│  49 Python Tools                │  ← Cloned on first use
│  video/ audio/ graphics/        │     to ~/.open-montage/
│  enhancement/ analysis/ avatar/ │
└──────────────┬──────────────────┘
               │ Renders
               ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│  Remotion Composer (React)      │
│  + FFmpeg post-production       │
└─────────────────────────────────┘

11 Production Pipelines

On First Use — Clone Full Repository

The pipeline defs are baked into this skill, but the 49 Python tools and 767 skill files live in the full repository. On first invocation, clone and check out a pinned revision rather than floating on the default branch — an unpinned git pull --rebase on every invocation silently rebases onto upstream's current head, and none of the 49 tools or 767 skill files it fetches are reviewed in this repo. Upstream ships no tagged releases (git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/calesthio/OpenMontage.git returned nothing as of 2026-09-09), so OPEN_MONTAGE_REF pins a specific commit reviewed at that date instead of a version tag; re-run that ls-remote periodically and the operator should update the pin (and re-review) when it is time to move forward. If the network is unavailable when first setting this up, use OPEN_MONTAGE_REF=main and treat that as a known supply-chain gap until it is pinned.

# Clone or update OpenMontage at a pinned revision.
OPEN_MONTAGE_REF="${OPEN_MONTAGE_REF:-08e2151fa02de28a5d6a312b3d575692bf147ad7}"
if [ ! -d ~/.open-montage ]; then
  git clone https://github.com/calesthio/OpenMontage.git ~/.open-montage
  git -C ~/.open-montage checkout "$OPEN_MONTAGE_REF"
  cd ~/.open-montage && pip install -r requirements.txt --break-system-packages
  cd remotion-composer && npm install
else
  git -C ~/.open-montage fetch origin "$OPEN_MONTAGE_REF"
  git -C ~/.open-montage checkout "$OPEN_MONTAGE_REF"
fi

After cloning, tools are available at ~/.open-montage/tools/ and skills at ~/.open-montage/skills/.

Zero-Key Mode (No API Keys Required)

These capabilities work without any API keys:

• Piper TTS: Offline text-to-speech narration
• Pexels/Pixabay: Free stock footage and images
• Remotion: React-based video composition and animation
• FFmpeg: Post-production, trimming, mixing, encoding
• ManimCE: Mathematical animations
• Auto-captioning: WhisperX transcription → subtitle burn-in

# Run zero-key demo
cd ~/.open-montage && make demo

Premium API Capabilities

Execution Flow

1. Route: Select pipeline from the table above based on user's request
2. Research: Use perplexity-research skill or OpenMontage's built-in web research
3. Script: Agent writes script following pipeline's skill guide
4. Assets: Generate images/video/audio using pipeline's tool chain
5. Review: Agent self-reviews by extracting frames and transcribing
6. Compose: Remotion renders or FFmpeg stitches final video
7. Output: MP4 with subtitles, mixed audio, platform-optimised resolution

Checkpoint Protocol

Each stage saves state as JSON. If interrupted, resume from last checkpoint:

# State files at ~/.open-montage/checkpoints/
ls ~/.open-montage/checkpoints/

Cost Governance

Built-in cost estimation runs before each API call. Configure spend caps in ~/.open-montage/config.yaml:

cost_governance:
  max_per_action: 2.00      # USD per API call
  max_per_pipeline: 25.00   # USD per full production
  require_approval_above: 5.00

Integration with Existing Skills

Troubleshooting

Remotion build fails:

cd ~/.open-montage/remotion-composer && npm install && npx remotion --help

Piper TTS not found:

pip install piper-tts --break-system-packages

GPU tools (local video gen):

cd ~/.open-montage && make install-gpu

Attribution

OpenMontage by calesthio. MIT License. 11 pipelines, 49 tools, 400+ agent skills.