Changes to Video Director - It's About Using the Right Tools for the Right Jobs

I've talked a bit about Continuous Integration (CI) in the past, and I've talked about Video Director, the app that lets us build demo videos of applications build using our AI Application Manager.

How does that all come together into a single blog post?

It helps to know that Video Director, if entirely built to do all its functions inside a web application, is resource intensive. There isn't much you can do about it - creating video takes some horsepower. A hosted web server, no matter what service is used to host it, maybe isn't the right place for the generating and editing of videos.

It also helps to know that CI does a lot of work, too. Every time Application Manager is used to build functionality, promote code from dev to prod, or do a release of a version, CI checks to make sure all the pieces of the application pass a list of validations before doing any of those things.

Until today, CI was also responsible for "recording" the app demos as part of the build/promote/release process. It was good in theory, but not in reality. We blew the roof off our CI minutes allotment from GitHub due to video processing and reprocessing. After some thought, Claude Code and I decided to move all video recording and editing to my MacBook Pro, which is suitable for this job. After all, Macs are the tools of choice for many audio and video creators because they are built for these uses.

Now, with the help of CoWork, a local MCP server, and Video Director's MCP server, video is effectively recorded, edited, and rendered locally. The data about the recoding and renderings is saved to the Video Director web app. CI does what it does best - makes sure the web apps are never committed, promoted, or released with errors, and the actual video recording, editing, and rendering are done locally.

We keep CI from having to sprint through a daily marathon and wracking up big GitHub usage invoices. We also get to record, edit, and render videos as many times as we want without having to concern ourselves with cost. I could literally re-record videos all day long, and I'm not burning through expensive usage. I am now an unconstrained video creating nightmare for my Macbook.