Music videos and slideshows

Two music- and slide-driven outputs that look alike in a brief but ship differently — a beat-synced MP4 versus a navigable deck — and how to route to the right one.

Two outputs that a brief blurs together

“Make a slideshow from these photos and this track” and “make a slideshow deck for my pitch” both say slideshow, but they produce different things and route to different workflows. Name the output you want up front.

You want	Route	Output
Photos / clips cut to a music track, exported as a video	/music-to-video	A beat-synced MP4 with audio
A presentation you click through — slides, reveals, speaker notes	/slideshow	A navigable deck, not an MP4

/music-to-video turns a music track — an audio file, a video to pull audio from, or a track generated from a mood brief — into a beat-synced video. The music drives all pacing; any photos or clips you supply are cut onto the same beat grid, and a complete video needs zero assets (typography carries it otherwise). There is no narration and no website capture.

/slideshow authors a HyperFrames deck — discrete slides with fragment reveals, hotspot branching, and a built-in presenter mode with speaker notes. Its output is the running deck, served with hyperframes present. Do not point render at a deck: it resolves only the first scene and emits a silently truncated MP4. If the user didn’t explicitly ask for a slideshow, the skill confirms the deck route before authoring — that’s a routing decision, not a style preference. One authoring detail worth knowing: fragment reveal times are absolute positions on the deck’s master timeline, not per-slide offsets.

Base prompt — beat-synced slideshow

The verified starting point: photos cut to a track, exported to a square MP4.

/music-to-video 20-second 1080x1080 video from ./track.mp3 (pick the best 20 seconds of the track) and the 8 photos in ./shots/. Cut on the beat grid, one photo per bar, punch-in on downbeats, whip-pan transitions on phrase changes. End on the last photo with “SUMMER ‘26” in condensed caps. No TTS.

Rendered from the prompt above, unedited.

Every timing decision here is delegated to the track’s own analysis — you describe the treatment (“one photo per bar”, “punch-in on downbeats”), and the beat grid supplies the times.

Variants

Lyric video

/music-to-video 30-second 1080x1920 lyric video from ./song.mp3 (pick the strongest 30-second section — a verse into the hook). Transcribe the vocals for word timing. Lines rise in one at a time on the beat, big condensed type on a dark grain background; the hook lands with each word punching in on its downbeat. Keyword in each line highlighted in acid green. No photos — typography only. No TTS.

Word-level timing comes from transcribing the track (or from lyrics you paste, placed on the beat grid). No supplied assets needed — type is the whole video.

Kinetic promo from a mood brief (no track)

/music-to-video 15-second 1080x1080 kinetic promo. No track supplied — generate one: driving synthwave, high energy. Cut hard on the beat: full-frame word cards (“FASTER”, “SHARPER”, “SHIP IT”) slam in on downbeats, alternating black/white with inverted type, a glitch flash on each phrase change. End on the wordmark “NOVA” holding with a subtle ambient idle. No TTS.

With no audio supplied, the track is generated from the mood you describe; the beat grid it produces still drives every cut. Fast, high-energy briefs suit this workflow best.

Presentation deck (slideshow)

/slideshow Build a 5-slide pitch deck, 1920x1080. One idea per slide, each headline a complete-sentence claim (not a label), punchline first. Slide 2 reveals three pain points one at a time as fragments. Slide 3 shows bottom-up market math (accounts × ACV), not a bare “$40B TAM”. Add presenter notes to every slide, and a hotspot on slide 3 that branches to a “sizing methodology” detail slide. I’ll present it with hyperframes present.

This produces a clickable deck, not a video. Fragments are reveal hold-points inside a slide; the hotspot branches off the main line and returns on Back. Headlines follow the deck’s hard rules — complete-sentence claims, one idea + one visual per slide, font no smaller than a 30pt equivalent.

The knobs that matter

The beat grid. /music-to-video analyzes the track once into energy phases, onsets, rolls, silences, hard stops, and phrases, then cuts at real musical changes. You steer how it cuts, not when: “one photo per bar” sets cut density, “punch-in on downbeats” adds the accent, “transitions on phrase changes” reserves the visible moves for structural boundaries. On genuinely rhythmic music the grid is trustworthy and cuts snap to the beat; on calm music the grid is a metronome the analyzer imposed, so the skill paces by phrase and energy instead of hard-cutting — say “let it flow, no hard cuts” if the track is ambient.

Track section — describe, don’t timestamp. Ask for “the best 20 seconds” or “the verse into the hook” and let the analyzer choose boundaries that land on musical anchors. Hard timestamps (“use 0:32–0:52”) cut mid-phrase and fight the grid.

Asset supply. Zero assets is valid — typography and templates carry a complete video. Any photos or clips you hand it are woven in on the same beat grid (beat-cut or Ken Burns), so more assets means more to cut between, not a different pacing model. Point at a directory (“the 8 photos in ./shots/”) and name the end card.

Deck structure (slideshow). Fragments (reveal hold-points), hotspots + branch sequences (off-line detail slides), and presenter notes are the deck’s structural knobs. Ask for them by name — “reveal the bullets as fragments”, “branch to a detail slide from a hotspot”, “add speaker notes” — and the island wiring follows.

Failure modes

Hard track timestamps. The whole point of /music-to-video is that the track’s structure sets the cuts. A literal time window ignores the analyzed beat grid and lands cuts mid-phrase.

• ❌ use the section from 0:32 to 0:52
• ✅ pick the best 20 seconds of the track

Expecting an MP4 from /slideshow. A deck is authored as several top-level scenes with no master-root composition, so render resolves only the first one and truncates. The supported outputs are the live present deck and per-slide snapshots.

• ❌ /slideshow ... then render it to deck.mp4
• ✅ /slideshow ... I'll present it with hyperframes present — or, if you actually need a rendered video, use /music-to-video (beat-synced) or /general-video.

Wrong workflow for the output. Photos set to music that you’ll export and post is /music-to-video; a thing you click through live is /slideshow. Picking by the word “slideshow” alone builds the wrong deliverable.

Both prompts here are unnarrated. /music-to-video has no TTS by design; if you want a spoken voice-over instead of a music bed, that’s a different workflow (see the router in /hyperframes). For the six-part skeleton these prompts share, see Prompt anatomy; for adjectives that map to eases and transitions, Vocabulary.