notes-to-video

notes-to-video

Turn notes (LaTeX, PDF, or plain text) into animated explainer videos in the style popularized by 3Blue1Brown — using Manim, TTS, and ffmpeg.

A Claude Code skill that handles the full pipeline: content extraction, narration writing with cue markers, Manim scene generation with audio-video sync, validation, rendering, and composition.

Demo

Feed it lecture notes, get an animated explainer video. 🔊 Turn sound on — the video has narration.

Input: CS229 Lecture Notes	Output: Animated Explainer
Section 11.5 — Variational Auto-Encoder CS229 Lecture Notes — Andrew Ng & Tengyu Ma, Stanford University Used as demo input with attribution.	🔊 Sound on. 3 min video, generated from notes in one command. Download

Install

This is a Claude Code skill, not a standalone CLI. The npm package is a one-shot installer that drops the skill files where Claude Code can find them.

1. Install the skill files:

npx notes-to-video

This copies:

• skills/notes-to-video/ → ~/.claude/skills/notes-to-video/
• video_utils/ → ~/tools/video_utils/ (shared Python helpers the skill imports)

Re-run any time to upgrade.

2. Set up the Python environment (one-time, shared across projects):

python3 -m venv ~/tools/.venv
~/tools/.venv/bin/pip install manim edge-tts pydub faster-whisper
# Optional: chatterbox-tts (local voice cloning), torch with CUDA

3. (Optional) Add API keys for cloud TTS backends:

mkdir -p ~/tools/credentials
cat > ~/tools/credentials/.env <<'EOF'
MINIMAX_API_KEY=...
MINIMAX_GROUP_ID=...
OPENAI_API_KEY=...
EOF

Alternative install methods

Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add cymcymcymcym/notes-to-video
/plugin install notes-to-video@notes-to-video-marketplace

Manual: clone this repo, copy skills/notes-to-video/ to ~/.claude/skills/ and video_utils/ to ~/tools/video_utils/.

Quick Start

1. Open Claude Code in your project and ask:

   make a 3b1b-style video from my_notes.tex
   

2. Claude will:

   • Extract key concepts from your notes
   • Write a narration script with cue markers
   • Generate Manim scenes synced to the narration
   • Validate all scenes for visual issues
   • Hand you the build command

Features

• Notes to video pipeline — feed in LaTeX, PDF, or plain text notes, get animated explainer videos
• Audio-video sync — cue-based system that synchronizes Manim animations to narration timestamps
• CText kerning fix — workaround for Manim's broken Pango kerning (manim #2844)
• 4 TTS backends — Edge-TTS (free, default), MiniMax (best quality), Chatterbox (local + voice cloning), OpenAI
• Scene validator — catches text overlaps, out-of-bounds elements, text overflow, and line-through-text issues before rendering
• Cross-platform — Linux, macOS, Windows

TTS Options

Backend	Quality	Cost	Requirements
Edge-TTS (default)	Good	Free	None
MiniMax	Best	~$0.04/min	API key
Chatterbox	Good + voice cloning	Free	NVIDIA GPU
OpenAI TTS	Good	~$0.06/min	API key

How It Works

The core innovation is the cue-based audio-video sync system: