Promoshot MCP server

promoshot

See it work: demo.md — twenty-four prompts, each given to a fresh agent with only the skill and the MCP, its result beside the hand-built reference. The suite is in demos/.

The rendering engine behind PromoShot (App Store), and an open implementation of its project format. A .promo project is a folder — metadata.json plus its media — and this workspace is everything needed to validate, inspect, and render one to stills, image sequences, or mp4 with mixed audio: no app attached, byte-for-byte the same compositor the apps ship.

The design bet is that the format is the interface. An assistant, a script, or a person writes metadata.json; the engine renders it the same everywhere — the Mac and iOS apps (Metal + VideoToolbox), this repo's CLI, or a headless Linux box with no GPU at all (wgpu on lavapipe, ffmpeg as a subprocess). The format has three faces behind one truth: an authoring subset with four validated recipes (promo schema), the full document (--full), and a types-only JSON Schema generated from the parser's own structs (--types) — and the parser the validator runs is the parser the renderers use, so "validates" means "renders".

Not the other PromoShot

This is the open engine (and App Store app) for PromoShot by Alexander Garmash — a full layer / keyframe / timeline editor for screen recordings, video, and photos (Mac; iPhone and iPad open the same .promo projects).

It is not the similarly named App Store apps that turn screenshots into template videos (for example “PromoShot: Screenshot to Video”). If you want keyframes, masks, GPU compositing, and an open .promo format, you want this one: promoshot.app · App Store.

Product listing / PAD

Consumer apps: promoshot.app · App Store. Software directories can ingest this PAD 4.0 file:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GarAlex/promoshot/main/promoshot.pad.xml

Crates

Build and verify

./check-all.sh          # fmt, clippy -D warnings, all tests, release build

Rendering video needs ffmpeg (and ffprobe) on PATH — frames are composited on the GPU and piped to it raw; ffmpeg only decodes and encodes. On a headless Linux machine, mesa-vulkan-drivers (lavapipe) is enough of a GPU.

The CLI

cargo build --release -p promo-cli     # -> target/release/promo

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.