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 compositor 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.

Recommendation:

• If you plan to deploy to Vercel, we recommend to trigger Remotion Lambda renders from Vercel Serverless functions. See our Next template or GitHub Unwrapped project for an example of how to do so.
• If you plan to deploy to a long-running server, we recommend rendering in a pure Node.js environment outside of Next.js API routes to avoid the complications of bundling server-side code.