Weekly updates

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Features

• Per-property keyframe lanes. Expanding a Studio track shows one lane per animated property instead of a single collapsed row. Keyframe track headers, per-lane retiming interactions, and variable timing and layout land with it, and keyframe percentages are computed in the tween’s own time frame rather than the clip’s (fed5e5b71, 8bb31b394, e36fb385b, d518972f8, 4a12eb9d9, 2d1b905a5, #2791).
• Timeline virtualization by default. Long timelines render only the visible rows, dense keyframe clusters stay readable, and Studio now tracks timeline performance so regressions show up as telemetry instead of as a complaint (c6925e471, #2926, 723d3381c, #2925, 10b517dab, #2898).
• Bulk easing edits. Selecting merged keyframes and changing their easing applies to the whole selection in one edit, and ease mode switches optimistically so the curve updates without waiting on a round trip (10d45def0, 659e22656, #2695).
• Three themed registry families, 29 items. mk-* is minimal presentation (9 items), yt-* is retro-broadcast creator (9 items), and hw-* is hand-drawn scribble (11 items). Contributed by @jbernard077, consolidating four earlier pull requests, cutting five items already covered by something we ship, and fixing the defects CI never got to report. beat-freeze-cut joins the transition set as a thirtieth item (f252ec6d9, d3d286a1a, #2939, #1933, #1992, #1993, #1994).
• Fast capture on Windows hardware GPUs. drawElement fast capture is open to Windows hardware GPU configurations, and Windows FFmpeg discovery candidates are validated before use (cb30157eb, #2841, 4ad1cf455, #2871).
• Two new layout check options. --layout proseCoverageFloor is available opt-in, and data-layout-allow-caption-zone waives the caption-zone rule where an overlap is intentional (209e6e014, #2834, 3a7950fd6, #2853).
• CLI state that survives a reset. Circuit-breaker state rolls over across a config wipe, and install-state moved into the config directory so deleting that directory is a genuine full reset (dfe92b2aa, #2874, dae1b63d4, #2904).

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Fixes

• Transparent GIFs stay transparent. --format gif silently flattened transparent compositions, because the palette encoder received JPEG frames with no alpha plane. GIF is now treated as an alpha-capable format, its frames are captured as RGBA PNG, and the palette is encoded with explicit transparency semantics. Page-side shader compositing stays enabled for GIF, so shader transitions blend instead of hard-cutting (6cfb05e38, #2327).
• A clean install reports no advisories. Installing hyperframes previously surfaced five npm advisories, four of them high severity, with no clean upgrade path. Patched floors land for Hono Node Server, adm-zip, and Sharp, applied consistently across the CLI, engine, producer, and Cloud Run. ONNX Runtime is pinned to 1.21.1 as an interim choice because 1.23.2 independently pulls the vulnerable adm-zip range, and it keeps all six platform bindings (13ac9e390, #2855).
• Media probing hardened end to end. Malformed frame-rate ratios are rejected instead of becoming NaN, file paths are passed after -- so a name starting with - is not read as an option, the PNG walk anchors at IHDR and stops at cICP using native crc32, colour metadata merges per field with correct alpha detection, the AAC duration refinement is cancellable and limited to AAC-LC, and stdin is rejected while stdout is decoded correctly and bounded (f75ca076b, #2740, 2af3f4d0e, #2912, 62b96c227, #2913, 19dc83bc2, 4d563fa75, #2914, 242a42f6c, 361fd4992, #2915, 9e275423e, #2916, 96a6e8bd9).
• Bounded HDR and video extraction. HDR and video frame extraction now run against explicit resource bounds instead of scaling with whatever the source demands (233975737, #2955).
• Keyframe edits land on the element you clicked. A run of fixes replaces inferred targets with the real one: every new tween is authored against a single element, a keyframe added at the playhead targets one element, lane edits and fallbacks resolve against the clicked element, colliding keyframes are targeted exactly, tweens are attributed to their real target, and a target the DOM has proved is not unique is never re-authored (3d9243606, #2849, fd5555be7, #2847, ba8df2661, c20c5366d, #2846, 7482c22d8, #2692, 59a818e80, f04cdb79c, 1f3fd2800).
• The preview reload loop is gone. Writes to .transcode-cache and the waveform cache touched files the project watcher was watching, so a preview reloaded in a loop and shader transitions stuck partway through. Generated caches are ignored by the watcher and excluded from project metadata (7ea8250f5, bf739a4db, #2952, 1d01b9f2c).
• Preview reliability and resolution. Preview recovery is hardened, loading reliability improved, retained preview resources are released instead of accumulating, Chrome resolves on Windows, and a selected render resolution is honored rather than silently replaced (c62bd4c45, 18b9acac1, #2837, fbfffb1aa, #2924, d8d626537, #2878, f1655b930, #2876).
• Drilling into sub-compositions. Every host row stays on the drill path rather than just the top one, children expand against their resolved parent host, hidden state persists on expanded rows, sub-compositions stay expanded at the end of the timeline, and sub-composition clip timing is computed correctly (acad7b268, d48440a9b, 12546985f, 5dad52370, 3e342cff9, 3f0c20f63, #2845).
• Timeline accessibility and pointer targets. Track numbers announced to assistive technology are the real ones and aria-controls points at the lanes, toolbar and lane controls meet the 24x24 pointer-target minimum, ruler clicks seek to the pressed position, Escape cancels a retime, the scrub clamps to 0 instead of being dropped, and popovers and tooltips stop clipping at panel edges (1faa0cbda, #2848, 4e74eefdd, 69020699d, #2843, 706f537f3, b386b55f7, f81ac7457, #2890).
• Colour field and shortcuts panel. The hex field accepts 3-digit shorthand, can be edited, and commits on an outside press. The shortcuts popup drops aria-modal because it is not modal, and dismisses on Escape or an outside press (86f633f98, 55614033e, 7f0cadcbb, aa2811642, #2844).
• Audio and nested timing. Hidden audio is excluded from the render mix, plateaus survive sampled audio automation, nested template video timing is offset correctly, and distributed video metadata is validated before a plan is built (b7160f69b, #2870, 04e0ccce4, #2863, 9bbb6d50a, #2859, 557d82b6a, #2839).
• Fonts, downloads, and browsers. Large local fonts stay file-backed instead of being inlined, transient deterministic font fetches retry, stalled download cleanup is awaited, a host-compatible cached browser is selected, and the check navigation timeout is honored (87791fd01, #2864, 20f4f8f49, #2865, 0bf33cb11, #2835, 85f0c9d35, #2861, fdc593289, #2860).
• Website capture is bounded and honest. Capture runtime stages run against a live budget that is validated and propagated, a blocked page is rejected outright rather than passing a login wall through as a screenshot, failure diagnostics are preserved, skipped Lottie previews are omitted, and bounded vision failures are reported (765a5ae83, 49091e614, d3607606e, 22e3cca96, 9ae000726, ac9458888, dfc60797a, b38e90740, #2933).
• Fewer false lint failures. An asset src still holding an unresolved templating token is no longer reported as a missing asset, and the placeholder skip is consolidated into one shared predicate (6c185f252, #2893, 5a6e4b1a8, #2894).
• Registry polish. mk card offsets animate with transforms instead of top and left, connector geometry and family accents are corrected, demo legibility is improved, and the device timeline registers synchronously (ce7d75dba, #2960, 35231e964, 2bb620517, #2546).

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Under the hood

• Render routing telemetry. Live DOM element count is now measured at capture-session init on every render rather than only on the 17% that open a probe session, so the fleet element-count distribution is finally observable. This is deliberately observational and does not feed the routing gate (d74afc7b7, #2891).
• Groundwork for faster short compositions. A controlled sweep found single-worker drawElement beating parallel screenshot by 1.16x to 1.24x on compositions between 250 and 899 frames, which is where the median fleet render sits. A 2x2 then showed motion and DOM size pulling in opposite directions, so the band is gated on an element ceiling rather than a bare floor drop, which would have handed large compositions a 1.8x regression. This release computes and emits that band decision on every render but changes no routing: it stays behind HF_DE_SHORT_BAND_ROUTE, so the follow-up flip is measurable against a real baseline rather than a guess (0749cd9ff, e9de2fa14, def98f79c, 4dbf0d90b, 23854f7c6, #2875).
• Parallel drawElement router. The router’s minimum-frames floor drops from 2000 to 700 after a crossover sweep found three workers beating one at every size tested. The router itself stays off by default behind HF_DE_PARALLEL_ROUTER, so this tunes what it will do rather than changing today’s renders. Render events also gain battery and low-power state on macOS, because the same composition was measured flipping between two power-management regimes with no signal to segment by (3da31e399, #2838).

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Docs

• Colour grading and film effects. The prompting guide gains a colour grading and film effects chapter, agent guidance links to it, and the --hf-color-grading-intensity claim is corrected and made order-agnostic. Professional grading and media treatments are documented, with the treatment contracts spelled out (819ed632d, #2911, 2517f1773, dd9c86d07, 0c7c9bbdb, e4eac0c21, 1a2c30a79, 12452a115, 182862773, #2826).
• The motion chapter, rebuilt. Each rule now carries before-and-after prompts and an exaggerated applied side, the chapter leads with meaning rather than amplitude, and it adds the motion-purpose filter, offset ratio, property coherence, the worker-boundary determinism caveat, and an “Avoiding the slideshow” continuity contract. Demos are rebuilt around motivated subjects and embedded as validated renders (6f29f1454, cebf66e6e, 1f4d00e15, d4bd2917b, 4f6fb8fc1, cdac57c07, dd4fd9cef, #2109).
• The intent interview. The guide documents the intent interview and aligns its pages with the skill contracts, so an agent’s first move is a question rather than a guess (2efbfd475, #2872).
• Contributing and setup. The catalog contribution guide is refreshed, and the Studio monorepo dev server port is documented in both the setup guide and the Studio docs (67ffafb11, #2954, a52dd9c30, #2902, ffe5e12cf, #2901).
• Guides and adopters. THU-MAIC is added as a HyperFrames adopter. The Send-to guide is unlisted from the web nav because it is served through the tool rather than found by search, and it now states plainly that enhance turns are free while render is the paid step (1738b5a11, #2761, a3c8f897f, #2918, e3636db07, #2827).
• Product launch video. The guidance uses real screenshots for site showcases, catches motion jumps at frame cuts, and avoids weak music openings in short launch videos. Defects the end-to-end run exposed in capture, audio, and docs are fixed (860954d71, #2881, 5466bcecc, #2880, 30900c346, #2882, e0dc255e8, #2892).
• Skills. Blocked website captures are gated in the skills docs, media-treatment policy targets are named instead of alluded to, and transition roots without an explicit duration are extended rather than dropped (30f383074, 6cab53a68, #2879, 14ced9051, #2873).

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Features

• Professional color grading. Core adds master and per-channel RGB tone curves, hue-vs-hue, hue-vs-saturation and hue-vs-luma curves, three-way shadows, midtones and highlights wheels, and HSL secondary qualifiers. Everything normalizes through one shared contract, so a grade you author resolves the same way in preview and in render (f99fc4e56).
• Grading controls in Studio. The inspector exposes the new curve and wheel controls with live previews, so you can grade a clip on the canvas instead of hand-writing a data-color-grading payload (20ef48abc).
• Agent-native grading from the CLI. hyperframes media-treatment applies, previews, and clears a grading payload by selector, with --dry-run before writing and --clear to remove. The media-use skill now reads the source and picks a treatment instead of guessing a preset name (6d5961b80, 4582881d0).
• Media treatments. A media treatment is a source-aware plan that composes existing color, effect, timeline, and registry primitives rather than adding a second runtime schema. Core defines the capability catalog, the runtime renders treatments deterministically, Studio ships an inspector for them, and the registry adds matching overlays (70213c5a8, 944640c32, 39c2341c4, b0d3164dd).
• Keyframe ease editor. Studio gets an ease curve editor with a preset library, editable ease parameters, and an SVG curve preview. A deterministic ease runtime backs it, so an authored ease replays identically at render time (c253dec23, 5acbf240c).
• Versioned distributed plan protocol. Distributed plans now carry an explicit protocol descriptor. Plans written before the descriptor still load as v1, while a partial, malformed, or unknown descriptor fails closed before any layout-specific read. Plan hashes and rendered pixels are unchanged (f9f00b0ef, #2777).
• Plan v2 publishing straight to object storage. A storage-neutral, manifest-last publisher lets cloud adapters write plan artifacts directly to S3 and GCS instead of a shared filesystem, and AWS Lambda now reads the v2 protocol. This is the groundwork for lifting the plan size limit on very large distributed renders (09998789b, 74d7bfde4, 5bf61d6df, #2789, 07f9a3de9, #2792).
• Data-driven caption components. caption-highlight, caption-weight-shift, caption-pill-karaoke, caption-emoji-pop, and caption-editorial-emphasis now build themselves from a shared caption-data runtime, with automatic grouping, an emphasis heuristic, and a generic emoji lexicon. A transcript drives the animation instead of hand-authored per-word markup (7d4e71d10, c67e9dc1f, 08620b75d, 392a9d251, ed8973952).
• New layout lint checks. Lint adds rotation_pivot_drift and off_pivot_rotation for hub-referenced rotation, and re-samples dense motion for content_overlap so fast collisions between samples are no longer missed (222aec45a, #2741, e710a1686, #2744, 72e2f08f1, #2746).
• Live map capture warning. The engine detects a live map viewport at capture init, names the map library it found, and points at the basemap-baking path, so streaming tiles do not silently produce a nondeterministic render (30ca51c61).
• Leaner, larger skills corpus. The composition skills gain seven blueprints and ten rules from a mining pass, while the router now routes once and dispatches packet-scoped workers so each run costs less context (853256403, #2680, 6ad738b58, #2618).

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Fixes

• Audio no longer runs past the picture. Padded audio is normalized on a sample timeline, the mux stops at the shortest normalized stream, the final mux is capped to video duration, AAC packet padding is trimmed exactly, and M4A edit timing and priming survive normalization (4b116b988, 532461599, 63bc525ca, 19258ea5b, afc4e96bb, 9289551e9, 59c56d325, 113a4985b).
• Portable audio padding. The audio filter chain drops an FFmpeg option the bundled Windows build rejects, so compositions that rendered video but failed to mux audio now complete. Typed audio failure causes are preserved through the engine, the in-process producer, and distributed planning (3b9552ef9, 37b88688e, #2769).
• Probe failures say why. ffprobe keeps a bounded stderr tail instead of running quiet, so a failed probe reports the actual error rather than a blank diagnostic (8c5077068, #2772).
• Hardened media downloads. Video downloads are atomic and retry transient failures, reserved and future-use IPv4 ranges are blocked, downloader trust-boundary gaps are closed, and network error shapes are narrowed honestly (c01f6b446, 2e84faeb2, 4b81f7858, 5ce2eb879).
• Distributed render reliability. Sparse video directories are materialized, distributed capture falls back safely, plan scratch state resets between runs, oversized plans are attributed and stopped early, partial color metadata is accepted in plan v2, and Cloud Run enforces effective BeginFrame capture (ddb59d356, 96cafb47c, ebb02cafe, d699cbf01, 58869f087, #2814, 2a284a8e3).
• Honest extraction errors. Frame-extraction launch failures aggregate into one typed error with narrowed shapes instead of surfacing as an opaque crash (33ca1de06, c01e1a5f9, 9b63646c8).
• Capture self-verification. Parallel and sequential disk drawElement samples self-verify, screenshot retry recovers disk-path verify failures, a verify failure rethrows past the completeness check, orphaned probe sessions close before retries, and frame stride carries onto worker results so interleaved workers stop reporting false positives (060b6f8ae, 9fc1c2f15, ec791e91d, c85cfae8f, b8e101547, 4f53dd4f2).
• Studio editing. Preview audio plays at speeds above 1x, flat keyframe retiming is hardened, tween keyframe diamonds retime correctly, composed media treatments survive a round trip, stale color scopes clear, and the grading contracts line up across panels (07965e9fe, #2691, 270179d94, f25a13692, d5c7d3ee1, c1fcf7534, 794930a07).
• Authoring fidelity. Position edits apply to SVG elements and not just HTML, nested-rule selectors survive composition CSS scoping, setText keeps <br> line breaks editable, and duration-authored keyframe timing and intent are preserved (63539a0cd, #2724, 1e2c7d673, #2733, dd7378bbd, #2742, 4bfbd89d6, d84e999f7).
• Fewer false lint failures. The media_in_subcomposition rule is dropped, bounded GSAP infinite repeats are allowed, compiler-derived data-end is recognized as legitimate, and the pivot-drift and connector_detached checks are tightened against counterfactuals (e7f9918d2, #2765, adb149b86, #2763, ac9f46310, 75ed99e1d, #2819, 7a294f195, #2739).
• Preview and coverage. The preview server serves external symlink assets, looping short videos are credited in the coverage gate, frame coverage aligns with extraction rounding, and invalid render durations are bounded (7778c093b, #2764, a637f394e, #2732, f0c2c7d23, 344d9c0a8).
• Runtime audio variables in distributed plans. Audio variables resolved at runtime are carried into distributed plans instead of being dropped when a render fans out (465c9e764, #2725).
• CLI process lifecycle. Command failures report once, error telemetry is awaited before finalization, the post-render exit reset stays root-owned, and the lifecycle migration is complete (73d3b4e1f, a9338a4e0, e0bda7a17, 619406a23).
• Caption template hygiene. Caption runtimes are wrapped in IIFEs, non-numeric caption-data versions are rejected, a boot fetch never clobbers a manual attach, brand custom properties clear on unbranded re-attach, GSAP renders at attach, and a quadratic hide-all-others loop is gone (e2846eb7c, 5c2981d06, 4f6994719, 020c8986f, 5af6203ae, 18de2b1f1, 8bf939043).
• Feedback telemetry. CLI feedback is sent as plain events, and the repro guidance no longer embeds identifying detail (597c14a88, 78ab9bc88).

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Docs

• Send-to guide is discoverable. The Send-to guide is published in the nav and in llms.txt, so agents can find it without being handed the path (911b332bb, #2667).
• Changelog video skill. Captions are non-optional in the changelog-video skill, and a pre-build gate stops a run before it produces an unbuildable composition (807078c7c, #2729, 7d312bd17).
• Codex plugin packaging. The skills bundle now packages a Codex plugin upload alongside the existing surfaces (696cbdbbd, #2668).

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Features

• Automatic media proxying. Studio-server probes each source’s codec facts, transcodes a bounded H.264 proxy on demand, and the runtime swaps an undecodable source to its proxy so browser-hostile footage plays instead of showing a black frame. Render always uses the originals (9ca1e1710, #2587, 9d148d288, #2589, 39b588cbd, #2592).
• Proxies across the authoring surfaces. Proxies serve from the preview route, play, and the static project server, and bake into published archives. Projects can opt out with media.autoProxy or --no-proxy (67eab59f4, #2590, 74b4f1e8c, #2593, 35eff5038, #2595, 645880706, #2591).
• Alpha-capable proxies. Alpha sources get a VP9 and yuva420p WebM proxy instead of a refusal, so a ProRes 4444 file previews rather than going black (e8371a7ac, #2598).
• Media Use video generation. resolve --type video generates a HeyGen avatar video, free for new API users, and falls back to local LTX-2 when HeyGen is unavailable or you pass --local-only (0a66671fc, #2614).
• Flat inspector on by default. Studio’s flat inspector is now the default panel after this cycle’s fixes. Set VITE_STUDIO_FLAT_INSPECTOR_ENABLED=false to return to the legacy panel (a4167ede0).
• Size-aware cloud archives. Cloud render and publish honor .hyperframesignore, drop root render and snapshot output by default, and add cloud render --dry-run diagnostics so projects stay under the 200MB upload limit (e73304fb0).
• Clearer engine timeout errors. Puppeteer and page-navigation timeouts now name the env vars and escape hatches that fix them, and streaming-encode auto-disables on Windows software-GPU setups (6944a1c2d, 58cff5f6d, cbf2a2ec6).
• New GSAP lint rules. Lint flags seek-order and SVG draw-on hazards, relative-value second writers, tl.set initial hides, and cold-seek opacity reveals that break at render time (f3d210066, #2611, 4ad582606, #2612, 55ee559e4, #2503).
• CLI quality-of-life. The transcribe timeout is configurable with a duration-scaled default, --resolution accepts portrait aspects, and doctor surfaces the extract-cache directory alongside a new --frames-cache-dir flag (f8210d96d, 46e9ecf3f, ca3522750).
• SDK base variable reads. getVariableValue({ base: true }) reads the declared default before overrides, and attachSync re-syncs the override snapshot on iframe load (db5e06221, #2499, 4682da14f).

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Fixes

• Deep sub-composition nesting. Recursive sub-composition inlining now handles depth-3 and deeper nesting (d21883fe0, #2660).
• Final frame holds. Video holds its final frame through the rest of the composition instead of dropping to blank (2e8f871bc).
• No phantom capture duplicates. Capture stops compositing phantom duplicates when captureBeyondViewport is on (2be8a62c0, #2607).
• Clean CLI output. Diagnostics and the SystemMemory cgroup notice now go to stderr, keeping --json output and stdout parsers clean (b179c9536, #2520, d92d1d4f5, #2522).
• Studio reliability. Composition timelines are hardened, stale failed sidecars are ignored for existing renders, and stale SwiftShader layers are prevented (2b65b4efc, #2615, 2577aaffe, #2621, 54a3ef200).
• Platform fixes. Intel macOS background removal is restored, Windows work dirs avoid the output path limit, and a dyld crash on older macOS now points at HYPERFRAMES_BROWSER_PATH (04954ead8, #2480, 882c20324, #2479, 0d16f19b0).
• Media Use asset cleanup. Failed asset reservations are cleaned up instead of leaking zero-byte placeholders (49113eb08, #2627).
• Producer coverage gate. Held video tails are credited in the coverage gate (209784ab2, #2606).

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Docs & Examples

• Automatic proxying guide. New docs cover the proxy cache, published-proxy baking, the render-original invariant, FFmpeg requirements, and both opt-out forms (8c1b6c515, #2596).
• Send-to guides consolidated. The Send-to import guidance now lives in one guide, resolving an earlier fidelity contradiction (8bfc67688, #2619, 7acabbcde, #2620).
• Core skills install by default. The core skill set now installs by default on every surface (3bb26b0f0, #2554).
• TTS docs aligned. The skill’s text-to-speech docs now match the CLI contract (428e57191, #2483).