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 includes 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 safe project services to MCP clients.

Documentation

The canonical documentation is published with GitHub Pages:

https://alonshoa.github.io/Manim-Studio/

Useful starting points:

• Installation
• Quick Start
• External Projects
• Project Model
• CLI Reference
• MCP Overview
• Contributing

Quick Start

Build the reusable runtime image:

docker build --target runtime -t manim-studio:local .

For local non-container development, use Python 3.11 or newer and install the project in editable mode:

python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"

Check the environment and catalog:

studio doctor
studio doctor --catalog

Inspect registered content:

studio list
studio beats matrix_work/vectors_ab_to_v

Render a scene:

studio render examples/square_to_circle --profile draft

Inspect the generated build:

studio inspect <build-id>

Common Workflows

Render a named beat:

studio render matrix_work/vectors_ab_to_v --profile draft --beat resultant

Build a registered deck:

studio build examples --profile review

Export an all-slides deck to PowerPoint:

studio export <all-slide-deck> --format pptx --profile final

Run Studio against an external Manim project mounted at /workspace:

docker run --rm \
  -v "/path/to/project:/workspace" \
  -w /workspace \
  manim-studio:local \
  studio list

Generated external projects default to manim-studio:local and can be pointed at another locally available image when needed:

studio project init ./demo --name "Demo Project" --image-tag manim-studio:local

Run the MCP stdio server through the runtime container without allocating a TTY:

docker run --rm -i \
  -v "/path/to/project:/workspace" \
  -w /workspace \
  -e MANIM_STUDIO_REPO_ROOT=/workspace \
  manim-studio:local \
  manim-mcp

Tests

Run tests from the repository root:

pytest tests -q

If the package is not installed in the current shell, use:

$env:PYTHONPATH='src'; pytest tests -q

Build the documentation locally:

python -m pip install -r requirements-docs.txt
mkdocs build --strict

Current Boundaries

Still planned or intentionally unsupported:

• 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 a default workflow
• a YAML-only animation language
• fully autonomous scene editing through MCP
• unrestricted shell access through MCP