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Can I render videos using Vercel Serverless functions?

It is currently not possible to render videos or stills on Vercel Serverless functions due to the 50MB maximum function size. Since Chromium is a dependency of Remotion, it alone almost entirely fills the quota available.

However, you can trigger a Remotion Lambda render through a Vercel Serverless function – our preferred choice for building applications. See our Next template or GitHub Unwrapped project for an example of how to do so.

Can I render videos in Next.js?​

If you don't deploy to Vercel, it might be possible to render videos in API routes using the server-side rendering primitives.
Check if your provider has enough disk space for Chromium and Remotion and has sufficient CPU and RAM to render videos.

⚠️ You need to be aware of the following:

  • You cannot use @remotion/bundler inside an API route, because it includes Webpack, and the API route itself is being bundled with Webpack. It is not possible to bundle Webpack with Webpack. Instead, use @remotion/bundler to create a bundle outside the API route and then use the resulting folder in your API route.
  • The @remotion/renderer package requires an FFmpeg binary from node_modules. Because an API route is being bundled, you might need to override the Webpack configuration to ensure the remotion binary is being included in it.
  • Error have been reported with the Next.js App Router because the remotion package exports client-side components. Those are false positives because no React components are being rendered.

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