An AI video studio that stops and waits for your notes

What it does

Mortiflix is a self-hosted motion design studio where Claude does the production work through your own Claude Code login or Anthropic API key. Instead of one prompt and a slot machine, videos move through a real pipeline — brief, script, style frames, transition board, animatic, final — and each stage stops at a gate until you approve it. You pin notes on exact frames or exact moments of a video, and the next version has to answer every note and show what changed.

The interesting bit

The rules live in code, not in the prompt: submissions are refused if they skip error checks or ignore your notes, and approved work is copied out of the session’s reach so it can’t be quietly altered later. Sessions end at gates and write a handoff journal, so a fresh session picks up hours or days later — waiting on you costs nothing. When you flag a real mistake, it proposes a new permanent check (“text never touches the frame edge”), and your taste accumulates in TASTE.md across projects.

Key highlights

• Four pipelines today: explainer, social-short, logo-sting, and a full instrumental song pipeline (researched genre, checked score, MIDI, per-channel instruments, mastered track)
• Renders in Remotion with ffmpeg-based QC: format, black/frozen frames, loudness, and a frame sheet Claude must actually look at
• Three narration options: ElevenLabs, local Qwen3-TTS via ComfyUI on your GPU, or your own voice via a built-in recording booth — with speech-to-text retakes when words go missing
• Transition boards render real in-between frames; a check samples every 10% of each transition and fails any blank or flash-to-white frame
• Pipelines are just folders — a pipeline.json, a PIPELINE.md, and skills — so anyone can write one

Caveats

• Tested mostly on Linux; Windows support is promised but not shipped, and macOS is untested
• Remotion’s license is free for individuals and small teams but paid above that — check it for your case
• It’s a harness, not a model: without Claude Code or an API key, only the placeholder demo backend runs

Verdict

Worth a look if you produce explainers or shorts solo and want AI output you can actually direct, not just reroll. Skip it if you want one-click generation or run a team on Remotion without a license.