spent 3 weeks building a tool that turns a landing page into a launch video. this is my progress
Founder here, so fair warning this is about something i built
context: every time i shipped something i'd skip the launch video. not because i didn't want one, editing it just ate 2-3 days i'd rather spend getting the thing in front of people. so i built a tool that takes a landing page url and turns it into a short square video for X
honestly the rendering part was fine.
the stuff that took me forever was different:
first, getting it to not look AI-made. my early outputs had that generic motion-graphics look you scroll right past. what fixed it was locking the whole thing to one aesthetic the engine can't wander off from. warm paper background, hard chunky shadows, actual typography. weirdly, giving it fewer options made it look more handmade. and how do you compete with Claude Design??
second, the voiceover. it kept running longer than the actual video, which looks broken. so now the script gets capped at a word budget (around 2.4 words per second of runtime) and if it's still too long ffmpeg speeds the audio up a bit, but i cap that at 1.15x. go past that and it's straight up chipmunk. took me a while to find that ceiling.
third thing, and this one i wasn't expecting: local TTS just won. i run Kokoro on the box instead of paying for a hosted voice API. no per-render cost, no rate limits, and for short punchy launch copy i genuinely can't hear enough of a difference to justify paying.
anyway, that's the writeup. ok cool bye!