Article / news → short#

Take any URL with a substantial article body and produce a vertical short with voiceover + auto-cut stock b-roll + captions.

When to use this skill#

• Source is a news article, long-form blog, press release, or essay.
• Output goal: an edited summary, voiceover + visuals, 30–60 s.
• The user does NOT want a talking-head (use revid-blog-to-avatar-video for that).
• For e-commerce product pages prefer revid-shopify-product-promo — same workflow but tuned defaults.

Inputs#

FieldRequiredNotesurlyesArticle URLaspectRationoDefault 9:16``targetDurationnoDefault 45 slanguagenoAuto-detected; override for non-English

Step-by-step#

1. Validate the URL.
2. POST the payload below.
3. Poll /status (canonical loop in the Polling section below).
4. Return videoUrl.

API call template#

http

POST /api/public/v3/render
Host: www.revid.ai
Content-Type: application/json
key: $REVID_API_KEY

json

{
  "workflow": "article-to-video",
  "source": {
    "url": "{ARTICLE_URL}",
    "scrapingPrompt": "Summarize the article body. Skip ads, related links, navigation, and footer."
  },
  "aspectRatio": "9:16",
  "voice":    { "enabled": true, "stability": 0.6, "speed": 1.0, "language": "en-US" },
  "captions": { "enabled": true, "position": "middle", "autoCrop": true },
  "music":    { "enabled": true, "syncWith": "beats" },
  "media": {
    "type": "stock-video",
    "density": "medium",
    "animation": "soft",
    "quality": "pro",
    "videoModel": "pro",
    "imageModel": "good"
  },
  "options": {
    "targetDuration": 45,
    "summarizationPreference": "summarize",
    "soundEffects": true,
    "hasToGenerateCover": true,
    "coverTextType": "headline"
  },
  "render": { "resolution": "1080p", "frameRate": 30 }
}

Examples#

• examples/article-techreview.json
• examples/run.sh

Polling#

After POST /render, poll until status === "ready":

bash

PID="<pid-from-render>"
while :; do
  R=$(curl -fsSL "https://www.revid.ai/api/public/v3/status?pid=$PID" \
        -H "key: $REVID_API_KEY")
  S=$(echo "$R" | jq -r .status)
  case "$S" in
    ready)  echo "$R" | jq .; break ;;
    failed) echo "FAILED: $R"; exit 1 ;;
    *)      sleep 5 ;;
  esac
done

In production prefer setting webhookUrl in the request body and skip polling.

Failure modes#

SymptomFixscrape failedPre-fetch the article body server-side and switch to revid-script-to-video with the body in source.text.Off-topic stock visualsPass a tighter scrapingPrompt (e.g. "Focus on the financial markets angle, not the company history") and lower media.density: "low".Wrong language detectedSet voice.language and options.language explicitly.Captions clip subjectscaptions.position: "top".

See also#

• revid-shopify-product-promo
• revid-news-to-daily-short for generating news from a topic vs summarizing a known URL.
• revid-pdf-to-video for PDFs instead of HTML.