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ONDA

What is ONDA?

ONDA is a source-available, GPU-native, browser-free motion-graphics engine in Rust.

Motion graphics at GPU speed. No browser.

It is not a video editor, not an AI product, and not a design tool. It is a rendering engine and runtime for creating cinematic motion graphics and videos programmatically — for developers, creators, AI agents, and future visual tools.

You author scenes in React/JSX (the same developer experience that made Remotion successful), and ONDA compiles them to a plain scene-graph JSON that a native Rust renderer turns into frames — with no DOM, no Chromium, and no screenshot pipeline anywhere.

The architecture, in one line

Section titled “The architecture, in one line”
React  →  Scene Graph  →  Native Renderer  →  GPU  →  Frame

Compare that to the dominant approach (Remotion):

React  →  DOM  →  headless Chromium  →  screenshot per frame  →  encode  →  Video

The browser becomes a deployment target instead of the rendering substrate. The renderer is the source of truth, and the scene graph is the universal language: React, hand-written JSON, and AI systems all emit the same representation, and the renderer consumes only that.

What exists today

Section titled “What exists today”

ONDA is early. This documentation describes only what is implemented and verifiable in the codebase today — not aspirational features. Concretely, you can:

  • Author scenes in React with @onda-engine/react: <Composition>, <Group>, <Rect>, <Ellipse>, <Path>, <Text>, <Image>, <Video>, <Audio>, <Svg>, <Scene3D>, the useCurrentFrame / useVideoConfig hooks, interpolate / Easing / cubicBezier, spring, and the <Sequence> / <Series> / <Loop> timeline primitives.
  • Emit scene-graph JSON from that React tree (renderToSceneJSON, renderFramesJSON) — or hand-write the JSON, or have an AI produce it.
  • Render a scene to a PNG still, or a movie to an animated GIF or MP4, with the onda CLI.
  • Choose a backend: the GPU-native Vello vector backend (anti-aliased fills/strokes, paths, gradients, clips, per-glyph vector text), or the deterministic tiny-skia CPU reference rasterizer, which renders fills, strokes, gradients and Bézier paths byte-identical to Vello (--backend auto|vello|cpu).
  • Import SVG documents (<Svg src | markup>) — they expand into vector path nodes.
  • Draw images and video straight into the scene (<Image>, <Video>), and compose audio — decode, FFT spectrum, beat detection, and a declarative synth.
  • Finish like a film: a render-to-texture effects stack (blur, bloom, film grade, grain, depth-of-field, motion blur), plus 3D layers and extruded text and logos.
  • Preview live in the browser: @onda-engine/player’s <Player> plays any composition in real time on the WebAssembly engine (WebGPU/Vello, with a CPU fallback) — the very same scene graph the CLI renders. Try the live demo.

What is not here yet

Section titled “What is not here yet”

To stay honest, these are explicitly not implemented today (and so are not documented as usable APIs):

  • CSS-style layout / flexbox, variable-font axes, OpenType feature controls, and color/emoji glyphs.
  • The CPU backend matches Vello for fills, strokes, gradients and paths, but does not apply rotation or clipping, or decode video — those remain GPU-only. See Backends.

For the full picture of where ONDA stands against Remotion and the Rust rendering state of the art, see Why not Remotion?.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”