Genlock Studio is pre-production for AI video — any generator. Take a script to a finished, generator-agnostic production — every shot, prompt, take and cut — as files on your own machine.
Every other AI production tool rents you access, quietly phones your IP home, and treats real generators as afterthoughts. Genlock does the exact opposite — and builds the whole product around it.
Your story lives in the open .SKEL spec, and BONE contracts translate it to any provider. When the next model drops, you swap a BONE — the production stays standing. Nothing proprietary holds your work hostage.
Scripts, characters, prompts, and finished frames are plain files on your machine — never uploaded, never trained on, never held hostage. License checks verify with offline Ed25519.
~/Productions/the-signal/story.skel ~/Productions/the-signal/renders/ Pay one time and the app is yours — every shot, every update, every future release. No seats, no metering, no cloud markup sitting between you and your own renders.
Drop in real screenshots and screen videos here: the cockpit, the drawer, the queue, the timeline. The site is shaped to show motion, density, and proof without changing the page architecture.
Generators are incredible tools. But they don't talk to each other, can't track your story, and upload your IP to clouds you don't control.
Higgsfield doesn't know about your Runway clip. Flux doesn't know which character is in shot 7. Every tool is an island — you're the glue, manually, forever.
Your best prompt for "the rain scene" is in a chat window from six months ago. You can't reuse it, version it, or let an agent find it for the next episode.
Every SaaS "production" tool uploads your scripts, characters, and visual identity to a cloud you don't control. Not Genlock. Not ever.
Genlock orchestrates every step. You own every file. No step requires Genlock's servers.
A generated image is not just an image. It knows the shot, the BONE, the provider, the prompt, the assignment, and the next step. That is the difference between playing with AI and running a production.
You never start from a blank shell. Every fresh install seeds a real, inspectable 12-shot production so you can see exactly how Genlock works — structure, prompts, BONEs, media maps, gap reports, and agent instructions — before writing a word of your own.
It's idempotent, too — your edits to the welcome story are never overwritten by updates.
Explore the showcase project →AI production fails quietly: a model silently swapped, a bill silently grown, a render that nobody can explain. Genlock's governance layer makes the machine's real capabilities legible and every production traceable and resumable.
One preflight probes your providers and runtimes and answers "can I ship today?" — Healthy / Degraded / Blocked, with honest per-capability badges and structured quick-setup steps. Never a half-armed capability called "ready".
Every generation contract declares what it requires. Boneyard and the Brain show armed / needs-setup / unavailable per BONE, so you know which shots can actually generate before you press send.
An append-only audit of every consequential choice — provider, model, runtime, quality gate — with options considered, rationale, and approval. Revisit a decision and the original stays on the record, visibly superseded.
Estimate → reserve → reconcile on every generation, with observe / warn / cap modes and per-action approval thresholds. No fabricated figures, no surprise bills — protection built for the pay-once user.
Models rank across seven visible dimensions — task-fit, quality, control, reliability, cost, latency, continuity — with rejected alternatives shown. Manual override always wins, and fallbacks degrade gracefully, never silently.
Resumable runs with stages, required-artifact gaps, human-approval gates, and spend tracking. An interrupted stage is never silently marked complete.
Everything lives as auditable files under projects/<slug>/.spore/ — strictly additive, so existing projects keep working. Read about the governed spine →
Chapters → Scenes → Shots. Drag-reorder, 4-shot discipline per scene, auto-save (Ctrl+S), focus mode. The ground truth of your production.
Open flat-relational YAML. LLMs read and write it. Every generated depth field survives a save round-trip. Published spec, zero lock-in.
Drop a .fountain screenplay. Genlock parses chapters, scenes, shots, dialogue, and action into .SKEL immediately. No copy-paste.
Tabbed drawer: Shot Data / Start Frame / End Frame / Video. Live prompt assembly, BONE inheritance badges, Soul ID auto-fill, macro chips.
Generator-agnostic prompt contracts. Swap Runway for Higgsfield by swapping a BONE. The story stays untouched. BONE inheritance: project → scene → shot.
spore-image / spore-video / spore-style. Author nested frames; Genlock serializes to each model's JSON shape (SEEDANCE/VEO/KLING).
Non-blocking, multi-provider. Active jobs with live CLI log tail, Needs Review with assignment actions, History. Any number of concurrent jobs.
image, video, marketing-video, product-photo, virality predictor. Async flow. Live model catalog reconciled to what the CLI actually accepts.
Shot N's end frame becomes Shot N+1's start frame. Continuity carries across every cut. The Sound Rule keeps music in post.
Dual-monitor NLE. V1–V4 + Dialogue/SFX/Music tracks with waveforms. Drag-resize, drag-reorder, markers, minimap, 50-step undo/redo.
Sequential shot playback with start/end-frame crossfade or active video take, dialogue subtitles, camera HUD, transport. Standalone pop-out window.
Auto-generated at workspace root. An agent reads your story, resolves BONEs, routes to the right provider, writes results back with the prompt. 77 abilities.
Chapters, scenes, shots, dialogue, camera intent, and production metadata stay organized as open `.SKEL` files instead of scattered outlines and chat transcripts.
Shot size, angle, movement, lens, lighting, frame continuity, Soul IDs, and active takes become controls you can revisit, not one-off prompts you hope worked.
BONEs turn model-specific prompt rules into contracts. Higgsfield, OpenArt, Codex, Claude, Gemini, and future providers all plug into the same production grammar.
What is missing? Which shots need frames? Which videos need review? What can export? Showrunner makes production state visible before deadline pressure does.
V1-V4 takes, dialogue, SFX, music, markers, minimaps, playback, and export packages turn generated assets into a sequence, not a folder graveyard.
Local-first files, offline licensing, git-native collaboration, reusable characters, locations, series, and packs make Genlock viable for serious teams.
Every dashboard is a different way into the same production truth: story, prompt, render, review, edit, export.
For creators who need the full picture without losing the shot-level details.
ProductionFor the person who has to know what is done, what is missing, and what ships next.
Studio ResourcesFor teams who want local-first without turning their disk into a scavenger hunt.
Prompt SystemsFor teams who want a prompt system that survives the next model launch.
Studio ResourcesFor creators building more than one clip, one episode, or one campaign.
AI & IntegrationsFor creators who want AI power that is observable, not magical.
Story & StructureFor writers who want structure without leaving plain, portable files.
Edit & DeliverFor creators who want the look locked into the pixels, not faked in CSS.
ProductionFor creators who need the full picture without losing the shot-level details.
ProductionFor the person who has to know what is done, what is missing, and what ships next.
Studio ResourcesFor teams who want local-first without turning their disk into a scavenger hunt.
Prompt SystemsFor teams who want a prompt system that survives the next model launch.
Studio ResourcesFor creators building more than one clip, one episode, or one campaign.
AI & IntegrationsFor creators who want AI power that is observable, not magical.
Story & StructureFor writers who want structure without leaving plain, portable files.
Edit & DeliverFor creators who want the look locked into the pixels, not faked in CSS.
The architectural decisions that make Genlock worth switching to — and hard to switch away from.
Flat relational YAML for stories. Acts → Scenes → Shots, with v_setup camera tokens, BONE registry, and character refs. LLMs read and write it without losing referential integrity. The deep-detail merged format (v2.6) adds lifecycle, embedded characters, scene mood, shot cinematography — all additive, lossless on save.
It's an open, published spec. Once a studio builds a pipeline on .SKEL, switching cost is enormous — not because we lock you in, but because the format is genuinely good.
Generator-agnostic prompt contracts. Each .bone.json defines: fields, UI hints, provider, prompt assembly strategy (template / sequential / raw), render write-back target, and llm_instructions — per-generator writing guides so agents know exactly how to prompt each model.
Swap generators by swapping the BONE. The story is untouched. BONE inheritance flows project → scene → shot. One consistent look, set once at project level, applied to every shot in the sequence.
Tauri + Nuxt. Files live on your disk. The workspace is a folder. License keys are Ed25519-signed and re-verified locally on every boot — works fully air-gapped.
You bring your own generator and LLM credentials. Genlock routes them locally; nothing passes through Genlock servers. This is the compliance story that gets past agency legal — and the reason Genlock's compute cost is exactly zero above what you pay your generator.
No markup on compute. No hosted inference. Genlock routes via CLI, MCP, or Skill — whichever is available — and never marks up generator cost.
Green = first-class in-app cockpit today. More providers plug in via BONE definitions — no app code changes needed.
Zero-key free floor: Piper offline TTS plus Archive.org & Wikimedia stock media (keyless) and Pexels & Pixabay (free key) register as first-class capabilities — you can draft a full production before paying for a single API key.
Genlock auto-generates agent instructions — CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, plus Cursor, Copilot, and skill files. An agent can read your story, check real capabilities, resolve BONE fields, route the right provider, and write results back — without you lifting a finger.
The recommended first prompt: Give me the Genlock production menu — the agent replies with everything it can do in your workspace right now.
Agents are grounded, not trusted: they read the capability matrix before proposing anything, append every consequential choice to the decision log, never fall back silently, and drop finished assets into _inbox/ with a sidecar manifest for Quick Ingest review.
Agent loads workspace rules, SKEL format, BONE registry, Higgsfield routing table, and per-generator llm_instructions.
Walks project → scene → shot inheritance chain. Soul ID auto-resolved from cast; face descriptions suppressed.
Selects CLI / MCP / Skill route based on what's ready. Assembles structured JSON prompt per bone's assembly strategy.
Output path: renders/{shot_id}.{bone_id}.ext. Prompt stored with every asset. Virality scores written to bone fields.
No subscription. No cloud markup. Free tier is genuinely free — one full project, no card required.
Studio bundles (multi-seat, one invoice) — contact us
This is the compliance story that gets past agency legal — and what makes Genlock genuinely usable in professional production environments, not just hobby projects.
Read the privacy guarantee →Start free with one full project. Keep your story, prompts, renders, takes, and cut as files you own.
When the next model arrives, swap the BONE. The production stays standing.