Manim Studio
Manim Studio is a local, reproducible workspace for building educational
presentations, animations, and interactive slide decks with Manim Community and
Manim Slides.
The project is in an early but working foundation stage. It provides a
registered scene catalog, the studio CLI, render profiles, isolated build
directories, named beats for targeted iteration, a small reusable Manim Kit, and
a local MCP server that exposes the same project services to MCP clients.
Who This Is For
Use Manim Studio when you want to:
- keep Manim scenes as normal Python source files
- register scenes and decks so tools can validate and render them consistently
- iterate on long scenes through named conceptual beats
- build review artifacts and delivery-oriented exports from reproducible local
commands
- expose safe Manim project operations to MCP clients without giving them shell
access
Fastest Path
Build the local runtime image:
docker build --target runtime -t manim-studio:local .
Then inspect and render the registered examples:
studio doctor
studio list
studio render examples/square_to_circle --profile draft
studio inspect <build-id>
If the package is not installed in the current shell, install it locally with
Python 3.11 or newer:
python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"
Current Capabilities
- Docker runtime based on
manimcommunity/manim:v0.20.1
- VS Code devcontainer derived from the same runtime image definition
- Pinned dependencies for Manim, Manim Slides, PyYAML, MCP, and PPTX export
- Registered scene catalog in
catalog/scenes.yaml
studio commands for doctor, list, validate, beats, render, build, export,
and inspect- Render profiles:
draft, review, and final
- Isolated build directories under
builds/
- Review frames and contact sheets for review/final renders when FFmpeg can
extract frames
- Manim Kit helpers for theme values, Hebrew/RTL text, panels, slide bases, and
beats
- Local MCP server with safe resources, tools, staged scene edits, and render
debugging proposals
Not In Scope Yet
- HTML, PDF, ZIP, and mixed Manim/non-slide deck export
- Visual regression checks beyond review-frame/contact-sheet artifacts
- Cloud rendering, distributed workers, or GPU/OpenGL as the default workflow
- A YAML-only animation language
- Fully autonomous scene editing through MCP
- Unrestricted shell access through MCP
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