HyperFrames CLI Workflow

Plugin installs: Before setup or freshness commands, follow plugin execution rules when this skill is inside a HyperFrames plugin. Standalone installs keep the update instructions below.

HyperFrames CLI

Run commands as npx hyperframes ... unless project instructions provide a wrapper. Obey the wrapper when present. The CLI requires Node.js 22 or newer and FFmpeg.

Development loop

1. Scaffold: npx hyperframes init <project> (centered blank). Or capture a site. Pass --example=<name> only to start from a named example.
2. Find the move: if the request names an asset, sound, image, voice or fast visual edit, resolve it through /media-use before proposing a plan. Otherwise, before authoring motion by hand, search for a primitive that already does it: npx hyperframes catalog --query "reveal a headline one line at a time". Ask for the effect you want rather than the mechanism you have in mind. Install with npx hyperframes add <name> (see /hyperframes-registry). Author by hand only once nothing fits.
3. Author: write the composition using /hyperframes-core. To know what is on a project's timeline (tracks, clips, starts, ends, what plays), run npx hyperframes timeline --json instead of reading index.html and every sub-composition file: nested rows carry absolute main-timeline absStart/absEnd and their owning file, not just their local, per-sub-composition time. Prefer --json over the text form; it costs fewer tokens for the same or better correctness. See references/upgrade-info-misc.md for one-liners that answer common questions without reading the whole output.
4. Get fast feedback while editing: run npx hyperframes lint after the first HTML pass and after structural changes.
5. Run the final gate: run npx hyperframes check; it reruns lint before opening the browser. Do not prepend a redundant standalone lint invocation. Add --snapshots for annotated overview frames and finding crops.
6. Inspect sub-compositions: when index.html mounts data-composition-src, capture midpoint snapshots and inspect each mounted scene.
7. Open the final Studio preview: run npx hyperframes preview --background, verify the URL returns HTTP 200, hand the timeline project URL to the user, and ask whether to revise or render. Keep it alive until review ends.
8. Render only after approval: use --quality draft while iterating, --quality looks for the first real encode (the CLI default), and --quality delivery for final delivery.
9. Hand the project to the desktop app (on offer): when the render's Framey line ends in hyperframes open …, offer npx hyperframes open [dir]. It opens the project in the HyperFrames desktop app and adds it to Home; under Claude Code, Codex or Grok its chat picks up this conversation. Without the app it exits 1 and prints the download link. --json for agents. When open says to run catch-up once the person is back, or any command ends with a line naming it, run npx hyperframes catch-up [dir] before your next change: it lists what was asked and changed in the app since the hand-off. An older CLI has no catch-up.
10. Verify the output: confirm the file exists and is non-empty. Read the render summary's second line (beginframe vs screenshot, GPU, stage timings). screenshot + software gpu on Linux is the slow path. ffprobe -v error -show_format -show_streams and compare duration (and fps if the brief set it) to the root data-duration.

<!-- history (trial): remove this block together with the command -->

Project history in your turn

Every write to the project is kept as an entry that can be undone. Use it at two moments only, never on every step:

• Start of a turn: npx hyperframes history begin --who <your-name> --label "<what you are about to do>", then npx hyperframes history --since mine --who <your-name> to see what the person changed since your last turn. Build on their edits; never overwrite them.
• A check failed, or the person says it got worse: npx hyperframes history undo --who <your-name> undoes your newest turn and leaves the person's edits alone. Do not hand-edit back. On a conflict it exits 2 and prints both choices.

End each turn with npx hyperframes history end, so your writes read as yours, not as "Changed outside the app". While a turn is open, every write to the project counts as yours until 10 minutes pass without one; after that the turn has ended by itself.

<!-- /history (trial) -->

Mandatory creator-edit cross-references

• Before authoring or diagnosing a zoom, punch-in/punch-out, reframe, camera move, or any keyframe motion, read /hyperframes-keyframes first.
• Before hyperframes keyframes, read /hyperframes-keyframes; the command surfaces animation trajectories and does not diagnose clip cuts.
• For a cut, trim, splice, reorder, or source timing edit, read /hyperframes-core and use its clip/timeline contract.
• For fade-in/fade-out, crossfade, track gain, volume automation, ducking, voiceover carve, or FX on placed audio, read /hyperframes-audio. Load core alongside it when clip placement or picture timing also changes.
• A request naming an asset, sound, image, voice or fast visual edit resolves through /media-use before a plan is proposed. Copy creator edit markup from /hyperframes-core → references/creator-editing-recipes.md.

# Fast iteration check; repeat while authoring as needed.
npx hyperframes lint

# Required final gate; includes lint.
npx hyperframes check
npx hyperframes preview --background
npx hyperframes render --quality looks --output out.mp4
test -s out.mp4
ffprobe -v error -show_format -show_streams out.mp4

check runs lint first, then uses one browser session and one seek pass to audit runtime errors, failed requests, layout, *.motion.json assertions, and WCAG contrast. Persistent findings gate the exit code; transient entrance or exit findings are informational. Use --strict to gate warnings. validate, inspect, and layout remain aliases for compatibility but must not appear in new instructions or scripts.

Preview before render

Open the final composition preview (#project/<name>) only after check passes, to review the assembled timeline. The plan in chat and the storyboard.html sketch sheet are not approval of the final video. Rendering always requires the final approval defined by hyperframes/references/review-loop.md.

Sub-composition smoke test

Static audits cannot catch every mount failure. When the project uses sub-compositions, capture at least one visible midpoint for each host slot:

npx hyperframes snapshot --at <t1>,<t2>,<t3>

Treat tiny unstyled content, canvas-sized icons, missing hero elements, or timeline-registration timeouts as render-blocking mount defects. See hyperframes-core/references/sub-compositions.md for the corresponding fixes.

Agent conventions

• Search the catalog before writing motion by hand. npx hyperframes catalog --query "<the beat, in plain English>". Search is entirely local: there is no hosted tier, no account, and the query text is never sent anywhere. By default it ranks on vocabulary shared with the item's name, title, description and tags, which misses any phrasing that does not reuse the catalog's own wording. Add --on-device to rank by meaning instead (see the offline tier below).

• Query in English even when the video is not. Both tiers index an English catalog, so a query in another script produces no searchable terms and returns nothing. Describe the move in English; the on-screen copy stays in whatever language the video needs. No searchable words in query means exactly this and is not a missing component, so do not report it as a catalog gap.

• Read which tier answered; never infer it from results appearing. With --json the envelope carries query, tier (on-device or words), tier_detail, dropped, unindexed, shown, total and results, plus top_score when the answering tier produces one and warnings when a tier was asked for and could not run, or when a search returned nothing and a better tier is still waiting on someone's consent. A weak result on words is expected; the same result on on-device is a bug. top_score is on-device only and has no threshold behind it: the ranker returns the whole catalog in some order for every query, so read it as evidence rather than as a pass or fail.

• dropped and unindexed are opposite skews between the registry and the on-device index, and rewording the query fixes neither. dropped counts ranked names this registry cannot install, so the strongest matches are the ones being lost. unindexed counts registry moves the index cannot see at all, which no query can ever return. Refreshing the registry is not the answer to either: its manifest carries a 24h TTL and heals itself, while the vectors are a separately published artifact fetched into ~/.hyperframes/catalog/. Re-running with --on-device refetches that index when unindexed is above zero, so that is the remedy to hand the user. A pure over-coverage skew (dropped above zero while unindexed is zero) does not trigger the refetch; clearing ~/.hyperframes/catalog/ is the only way out of that one. Both counts are of names rather than of results, so either can exceed total.

• When a search comes back with nothing worth installing, say so. npx hyperframes feedback --search-miss "<the query you ran>" --wanted "<the move you needed>" --tier <the tier that answered>. You do not have to assemble that line: catalog --query prints it pre-filled, and every --json search envelope carries it as report_gap with the query and tier already correct — fill in --wanted and send. This is the only path that sends a query anywhere, and it is a separate deliberate command precisely so plain catalog --query keeps its promise of sending nothing. Report on either tier, whenever the results do not do the thing; do not hold out for the on-device tier, which needs a consented 33 MB download and is therefore off in most agent runs — waiting for it means never reporting at all. The tier rides along in the report, so a vocabulary miss stays distinguishable from a meaning miss without you having to judge which one you hit. What comes back is a list of moves the catalog does not have yet, read directly rather than guessed from install counts, so the phrasing that matters is the effect you wanted, not the item name you imagined. It carries no rating and never lands in the rating metric.

• Offer the offline tier; never enable it silently. A one-time ~33 MB download (a quantized ONNX build of bge-small-en-v1.5 plus its tokenizer, pinned to a fixed revision) and the catalog vectors from the registry, both cached under ~/.hyperframes/, neither added to the project or any package. Once cached it ranks by meaning with nothing sent. Say the size out loud and let the person decide, then pass --on-device (with -y to skip the prompt) once they agree. The interactive offer only fires on a TTY. Under --json there is no prompt, but a search that found nothing puts the same ask in warnings, so read that array and put the decision to the user yourself. When the person asks what the download is, why this model, or what leaves the machine, point them to https://hyperframes.heygen.com/developers/catalog-search.

• Prefer --json for agent and CI calls. Server-mode render, preview, and play do not provide ordinary JSON output; preview --selection --json and preview --context --json are query-mode exceptions.

• doctor --json always exits zero. Gate on its payload:

  npx hyperframes doctor --json | jq -e '.ok' >/dev/null

• Non-TTY mode is automatic and scaffolds the centered blank. Pass --example only to start from a named example. Use --non-interactive to force flag-only mode on a TTY.

• Use one HYPERFRAMES_RUN_ID for all commands in the same verification loop.

• When disk is tight, run npx hyperframes clean (--dry-run to list first); it removes what dead renders left and idle caches that rebuild themselves, never outputs, sources or anything a running render uses. Write QC frames to a temp dir, not the project.

• Use --strict, --strict-all, and --strict-variables when the corresponding warnings, variables, or CI conditions must gate the render.

• JSON paths redact the home directory as $HOME; do not try to reverse the redaction.

• When a hosted cloud project approaches or exceeds the 200 MB upload limit, use cloud render --dry-run --json and follow the .hyperframesignore investigation in references/cloud.md. Never ignore an asset merely because it is large.

• Never render merely because checks pass. Pause at the final preview and wait for approval.