Article to Short

Turn any news article or long-form post URL into a 30–60 second 9:16 short with stock visuals, narration, and captions. Use when the user shares a link and w...

Security Scan

The skill's requests, instructions, and example code consistently match its stated purpose (sending an article URL and optional scraped text to revid.ai to produce a short), and it doesn't ask for unrelated credentials or install arbitrary software.

Purpose & Capability

Name/description (article → short) align with the runtime instructions and examples which call revid.ai's /render and /status endpoints. The only required config is REVID_API_KEY, which is appropriate for a third‑party render API.

Instruction Scope

SKILL.md instructs validating the URL, POSTing a JSON payload to revid.ai, and polling or using a webhook. It does not direct the agent to read unrelated files, other credentials, or system paths. The fallback advice to pre-fetch an article body is scoped to the same task.

Install Mechanism

No install spec is provided (instruction-only), so nothing is written to disk by the skill itself. Example scripts use curl/jq but those are examples only and not installed by the skill.

Credentials

Only REVID_API_KEY is required and declared; that is proportional to calling the revid.ai API. No unrelated secrets or environment variables are requested.

Persistence & Privilege

always is false and the skill does not request persistent system changes or elevated privileges. It does not modify other skills or system-wide agent settings.

Assessment

This skill sends the article URL (and optionally scraped article text) to revid.ai using your REVID_API_KEY. Before installing, consider: 1) privacy — any article content you send goes to a third party (don't send private/sensitive content). 2) API key security — store REVID_API_KEY securely and avoid exposing it in shared scripts. 3) copyright — ensure you have rights to repurpose the article into a video. 4) network trust — the skill communicates with https://www.revid.ai; if you need stricter controls, review the provider's privacy/retention policies or run server-side prefetching and use the alternate script-to-video flow described in the docs.

Article / news → short

Take any URL with a substantial article body and produce a vertical short with voiceover + auto-cut stock b-roll + captions.

When to use this skill

• Source is a news article, long-form blog, press release, or essay.
• Output goal: an edited summary, voiceover + visuals, 30–60 s.
• The user does NOT want a talking-head (use revid-blog-to-avatar-video for that).
• For e-commerce product pages prefer revid-shopify-product-promo — same workflow but tuned defaults.

Inputs

Field	Required	Notes
url	yes	Article URL
aspectRatio	no	Default 9:16
targetDuration	no	Default 45 s
language	no	Auto-detected; override for non-English

Step-by-step

1. Validate the URL.
2. POST the payload below.
3. Poll /status (canonical loop in the Polling section below).
4. Return videoUrl.

API call template

POST /api/public/v3/render
Host: www.revid.ai
Content-Type: application/json
key: $REVID_API_KEY

{
  "workflow": "article-to-video",
  "source": {
    "url": "{ARTICLE_URL}",
    "scrapingPrompt": "Summarize the article body. Skip ads, related links, navigation, and footer."
  },
  "aspectRatio": "9:16",
  "voice":    { "enabled": true, "stability": 0.6, "speed": 1.0, "language": "en-US" },
  "captions": { "enabled": true, "position": "middle", "autoCrop": true },
  "music":    { "enabled": true, "syncWith": "beats" },
  "media": {
    "type": "stock-video",
    "density": "medium",
    "animation": "soft",
    "quality": "pro",
    "videoModel": "pro",
    "imageModel": "good"
  },
  "options": {
    "targetDuration": 45,
    "summarizationPreference": "summarize",
    "soundEffects": true,
    "hasToGenerateCover": true,
    "coverTextType": "headline"
  },
  "render": { "resolution": "1080p", "frameRate": 30 }
}

Examples

• examples/article-techreview.json
• examples/run.sh

Polling

After POST /render, poll until status === "ready":

PID="<pid-from-render>"
while :; do
  R=$(curl -fsSL "https://www.revid.ai/api/public/v3/status?pid=$PID" \
        -H "key: $REVID_API_KEY")
  S=$(echo "$R" | jq -r .status)
  case "$S" in
    ready)  echo "$R" | jq .; break ;;
    failed) echo "FAILED: $R"; exit 1 ;;
    *)      sleep 5 ;;
  esac
done

In production prefer setting webhookUrl in the request body and skip polling.

Failure modes

Symptom	Fix
scrape failed	Pre-fetch the article body server-side and switch to revid-script-to-video with the body in source.text.
Off-topic stock visuals	Pass a tighter scrapingPrompt (e.g. "Focus on the financial markets angle, not the company history") and lower media.density: "low".
Wrong language detected	Set voice.language and options.language explicitly.
Captions clip subjects	captions.position: "top".

See also

• revid-shopify-product-promo
• revid-news-to-daily-short for generating news from a topic vs summarizing a known URL.
• revid-pdf-to-video for PDFs instead of HTML.