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⚡ Aether Renderer

⚡ Aether Renderer

Turn web animations and PNG frame sequences into transparent video — WebM, ProRes MOV, GIF or MP4. Rust crates, a CLI and a desktop app. Website: web2vid.com

Animation tools, canvas sketches and AI generators love to export PNG frames with transparency. Turning them into a video that keeps that transparency is surprisingly fiddly: the right codec, the right pixel format, even frame sizes, natural frame order, fades that go to transparent instead of black…

Aether Renderer does all of that in one command. Point it at a folder or a ZIP of frames and get a transparent WebM for the web, a ProRes 4444 MOV for your video editor, a looping GIF — or an MP4 flattened onto the background colour of your choice.

RustFFmpegTransparent videoCLITauriDesktop appOpen Source

🌐 web2vid.com ⭐ Crate & CLI on GitHub 📥 Download the desktop app

Aether Renderer GUI v0.2.0 in dark mode: a transparent lightning Æ animation previewed on a checkerboard after rendering to WebM

📦 Get it

Command line (needs ffmpeg on your PATH):

cargo install aether-renderer-core

As a library:

cargo add aether-renderer-core

Desktop app (macOS · Windows · Linux): aether-renderer-gui releases

CLI binaries: aether-renderer-core releases

Crates.io: crates.io/crates/aether-renderer-core · Docs: docs.rs/aether-renderer-core · Changelog: CHANGELOG.md

🎞️ Which format?

Format	Transparency	Best for
`webm` (VP9)	✅	Websites (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), small files
`mov` (ProRes 4444)	✅ full quality	Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, After Effects
`gif`	✅ on/off per pixel	Chat, email, README files
`mp4` (H.264)	❌ — flattened onto a colour	Social media, maximum compatibility

🚀 Features

📦 Frames from a folder or a ZIP, in natural order (frame_2 before frame_10)
🌗 Fade in / out to transparent — not to black
🎨 Background colour (--background '#1e1e1e') to match the page or video the clip sits on
📊 Live progress: a progress bar, --progress json for other programs, or a callback in Rust
🎛️ Quality control with CRF or bitrate, any fps, glob or numbered file patterns
🗂️ Options on the command line, in a JSON or TOML config, or both
🖼️ Preview a single frame without rendering
💻 macOS, Linux and Windows — every format tested on all three in CI

💻 Example: from the command line

aether-renderer-core -i frames/ -o out.webm                # transparent WebM
aether-renderer-core -i frames.zip -o loop.gif --fps 24
aether-renderer-core -i frames/ -o out.mov --fade-in 1 --fade-out 1
aether-renderer-core -i frames/ -o out.mp4 --background '#1e1e1e'
aether-renderer-core -i frames/ -o out.webm --progress json  # for GUIs & scripts

🦀 Example: as a Rust crate

use aether_renderer_core::config::PartialConfig;

let cfg = PartialConfig {
    input: Some("frames".into()),
    output: Some("out.webm".into()),
    fps: Some(30),
    background: Some("#1e1e1e".into()), // optional: flatten onto a colour
    ..Default::default()
}
.into_config()?;

let report = aether_renderer_core::render_with_progress(cfg, |p| {
    println!("{:.0}% ({}/{} frames)", p.percent, p.frame, p.total_frames);
})?;
println!("{}", report.summary());

✨ Example output — try it yourself

A starburst loop rendered from 150 transparent PNG frames (5 s @ 30 fps). The checkerboard shows through where the video is transparent.

📦 Download the frames

sacred-stars.zip

Contains frame_0000.png → frame_0149.png. Render it with:

aether-renderer-core -i sacred-stars.zip -o stars.webm

Also as a GIF.

⚡ Aether Renderer GUI

A small desktop app built with Tauri and Rust on top of the crate. Pick your frames, choose a format, press render. Works offline on macOS, Windows and Linux.

🎨 Keep transparency, or fill it with any background colour — with a warning when MP4 would turn it black
📊 Live progress bar with frames and percent, and real error messages
🏁 Preview the result on a checkerboard, so you can see the transparency
🎞️ WebM, ProRes MOV, GIF and MP4
🌗 Fade in / out, fps, CRF and bitrate in Advanced Settings
🌙 Light and dark theme

Status bar while rendering: Rendering 60% (45/75 frames) with a green progress bar

Aether Renderer GUI v0.2.0 in light mode after rendering a transparent WebM

📦 Desktop app

📥 Download (.dmg · .msi · .AppImage)

Needs ffmpeg installed. Source: github.com/madspaaskesen/aether-renderer-gui · Install guide: INSTALL.md

🎬 Coming next: record HTML & canvas

Point Aether Renderer at an HTML page — a p5.js sketch, a three.js scene, a CSS animation — and get a frame-perfect transparent video, with no changes to the page. Time is frozen and stepped frame by frame, so even heavy scenes come out at a perfect 60 fps.

🤝 Need video, image or desktop tooling?

I build Rust libraries, CLIs and Tauri desktop apps — media pipelines, file formats and the tooling around them — as Hardcore Websmith. I take on freelance work.

Get in touch Report an issue on GitHub

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