The reelsmith manual: how the editor works, the project format, Times, every tool, edit ops, components and what blocks delivery. Read it once before your first edit.

The editor's window as text: canvas, safe area, duration, voice lines, tracks bottom to top with their clips, assets and the latest issues. With at (seconds or a Time like "line:4"; "clip:c2.end" = c2's last frame), only what is on screen then.

Create a project folder with an empty project.json (no tracks yet), assets/, voice/ and script.md. Put it in /projects/ to get the workspace's library, rules and keys.

Apply a batch of edit ops atomically: all apply and validate, or nothing changes. Ops: add_track, update_track, remove_track, add_clip, update_clip, remove_clip, move_clip, split_clip, set_keyframes, add_asset (an existing id is replaced), update_asset ({"op": "update_asset", "id", "set": {...}}: deep merge, null removes a key), remove_asset, set (see the manual). Every applied batch can be undone.

Undo the last steps edit batches: project.json goes back to the snapshot taken before them.

Validate the project and apply the owner's rules. Errors block render; warnings and advice are information. Run it after a batch of edits and before render.

The components a component clip can use (built-in presets and your own library): name, source, what it is and its prop names. With name, one component in full: props schema, example props and the source file to read as a model. Also gives the path of the @reelsmith/kit reference (docs/kit.md).

Render stills at the given moments straight from the project (no full render): seconds or Times like "line:3", "clip:c2+0.5", "end-1" ("clip:c2.end" = c2's last frame). Up to 24 per call. Returns PNG paths (look at them with Read), a contact sheet with the platform's UI bands darkened and the safe area outlined, and measured layout problems. sweep=true also measures a still every second of the whole film, as render does before it encodes (no film is made): every layout problem that would stop render shows now, with stills of the flagged moments.

Render the whole film to out/film.mp4: refuses on check errors; measures text layout every second (the same pass as preview sweep=true); renders, masters loudness and runs the delivery checks. Anything failing keeps the previous film and says what to fix; a transient renderer failure is retried once and said to be one. Takes minutes: preview first.

Evenly spaced frames (2-24) from the delivered out/film.mp4 and a contact sheet, to judge the film as a phone viewer would.

Narrate: one item per voice line, a string or {"text", "pace"?, "emotion"?}. pace: "slower", "normal", "faster" or a speed factor 0.5-2 relative to normal (1.0 normal, 0.9 a little slower, 1.1 a little faster). emotion: a word or two (at most 20 characters, e.g. "惊讶", "平静", "surprised") passed to the voice as an instruction; how much it changes depends on the voice model. gap_s: silence between lines. Writes voice/voice.wav and voice/voice.json (line times), sets the project's voice if unset. Only changed lines cost money (cached). Paid: estimates first and refuses over budget.

Screenshot a web page at phone width as evidence asset id (assets/.png), boxing the sentence that contains match (a short exact phrase from the page, 8-20 characters is safest; empty boxes the title).

Generate an original image asset id from prompt (optionally in the style of an image asset). size: an aspect "9:16" (default, 1080x1920), "2:3", "3:4", "4:5", "1:1", "4:3", "3:2", "16:9", or pixels "WxH" with sides 256-4096. Paid or rate-limited depending on the provider; slow (minutes).

Turn image asset image_asset into a short silent video asset id (2-12 s) in which motion happens (what moves in the picture). camera: push, pull, pan_left, pan_right, rise or still (default push). Paid: estimates first and refuses over budget; a submitted job is resumed, never bought twice.

Copy a local file, or download an http(s) image/video/audio (size-capped), into assets/ and register it as asset id (an existing id of the same kind is replaced). kind image, video, audio or evidence (a page screenshot you have: its box is the whole picture until you set one with the update_asset edit op); empty detects it from the file. This is also how music gets in: import a file you are allowed to use.

The project's assets with kinds, sizes and durations.

Your own notes for this workspace (library/NOTES.md): what worked, what to avoid. Read them when you start.

Append a dated note at the end of the workspace's library/NOTES.md for future work (a lesson, a preference, a fix). Keep it short and specific. To put it under a heading or reword old notes, edit NOTES.md with your file tools.

Type-check your own components (library/components/*.tsx) with the renderer's TypeScript, before a preview bundles them. Lists errors in your files; errors elsewhere are counted, not shown.