Make it once, then every week
The second time you make the same kind of video, you rebuild it from memory. The fifth time, you’re copying the last one and hoping you remember why the titles were timed like that. By the tenth, the “series” has quietly drifted into ten slightly different videos.
A recipe is the fix, and it isn’t a template in the usual sense — not a file you duplicate and overwrite. It’s the method, kept: the instructions you’d give a good editor, a worked example of the structure, and the ingredients it’s built from. You point it at new content and get the next one in the same style.
The loop
Section titled “The loop”- Make one video properly. Get the pacing, type and motion right once — the way you’d want every one in the series to look.
- Keep it as a recipe. Create the recipe from that project. Its document becomes the worked example immediately; you write the instructions while the decisions are still fresh.
- Run it against new content. “Make this week’s update with our Product Update recipe — here’s the recording.” The agent reads the instructions, studies the structure, uses your linked assets, and builds it.
- Improve the master, not the copies. The structure is a live link to the source project. Fix the timing there and every future video made from the recipe inherits the fix. You’re maintaining one video, not a growing pile.
What “against content” actually means
Section titled “What “against content” actually means”The content you hand it is whatever the series is made of:
| The series | What changes each time |
|---|---|
| Weekly product update | A new screen recording |
| Customer story | A new interview, a new name and logo |
| Release notes | A new changelog, as a CSV or JSON |
| Social cut of a launch | The master video, reframed to 9:16 |
| Localised versions | A new language’s script or voice track |
| Monthly numbers | A new export from the dashboard |
The recipe doesn’t care which of those it is. It carries the treatment; you supply the material.
Why the last video doesn’t come with it
Section titled “Why the last video doesn’t come with it”This is the detail that makes recipes work as templates rather than as half-finished copies.
When a project becomes a recipe’s structure, its footage becomes slots.
Clips specific to the source — last month’s screen capture, the previous
customer’s interview — are rewritten to inert
placeholder://footage/<slot> references. The layer stays, its position and
timing and treatment stay, and the agent fills the slot with your new
recording.
Library assets are deliberately left alone. A logo or typeface that lives at workspace scope keeps its real reference, because it resolves from any project in the workspace — which is exactly what a brand asset should do. So the structure arrives with your fonts and logo intact and last month’s footage stripped out. That’s the difference between a template and a duplicate.
What travels with it
Section titled “What travels with it”Three things, which is why a shared recipe doesn’t arrive full of broken references:
- Instructions — markdown the agent reads before it builds, and which outranks Mixture’s own default guides. Your pacing rules, your type treatment, the motion that’s house style and the motion that’s banned, how data comes in, what to do with the end card.
- Structure — the live worked example, with footage slots.
- Ingredients — the fonts, logos, sound beds, LUTs and components it depends on, linked so they travel with the recipe rather than being assumed. The components are the load- bearing ones: parameterised pieces of finished design the next video fills in rather than rebuilds (see below).
The pieces that hold their shape
Section titled “The pieces that hold their shape”Instructions describe the treatment. Components are the treatment, already built — and they’re what stops the next video being reassembled from rectangles and hoping it comes out the same.
A component is a saved piece of design — a lower third, a stat card, a quote block, an end card — with named parameters for the parts that change. You decide what’s a parameter when you save it: the name and role on a lower third, the figure and label on a stat card, the accent colour. Everything else — the spacing, the type pairing, the motion, the timing — is fixed design that comes along for free.
That changes what “make the next one” means:
- Without components, the agent rebuilds the lower third from primitives each time and you get a family resemblance at best.
- With components, it places yours and fills in the parameters. The design is not being re-decided, so it can’t drift. It also reads each component’s exact parameter list, so it fills them in rather than guessing what they are.
Link them to the recipe and they travel with it — that’s the “ingredients” tab doing its job.
One design, every row
Section titled “One design, every row”Parameters are also what makes a component multiply. Point a repeat at a dataset and drive the parameters from its columns: one designed card becomes one card per row, each carrying that row’s content. A leaderboard, a team wall, a pricing grid, a stat rundown — designed once, filled by the data, and re-runnable next month when the numbers change.
That’s the template idea twice over: the recipe holds the shape of the video, the component holds the shape of a piece inside it, and both take new content without being redrawn. Components + data →
One edit, every video — including the old ones
Section titled “One edit, every video — including the old ones”Placed copies stay linked to the saved component. Fix the lower third’s spacing once and every video that uses it picks up the change — last quarter’s included, the next time it’s opened. Nothing to re-open and re-edit.
So a recipe’s quality compounds. Improve the master project and future videos inherit the structure; improve a component and past videos inherit the design. The series gets better as a set rather than drifting into a pile of near-misses.
Running one
Section titled “Running one”From an agent — the natural way. The ask collapses to one line, because the recipe carries everything else:
“Make this week’s update using our Product Update recipe — recording’s in the project.”
“New customer story from this interview, our usual treatment. Their logo is attached.”
An agent can also read a recipe without applying it — following the pattern while editing a video you already have.
From the app — apply a recipe to a project and the scaffold seeds it, so you open the editor on the structure rather than a blank canvas, then fill it in by hand if you’d rather.
Sharing the method
Section titled “Sharing the method”Recipes start private to your workspace, which is usually where they should stay — a house style is an internal asset. When one is genuinely reusable, send it for review and it can be published to the Community, where anyone can start from it. The assets and components it links become readable by everyone using it, which is what stops a shared recipe arriving broken.
Withdraw it and that access goes away again.
When not to make one
Section titled “When not to make one”Not every video is a series. If you’ll make it once, make it once — the recipe is overhead you’ll never earn back. The signal to keep one is repetition you can already feel: the third time you catch yourself opening last month’s project to remember how you did something, that’s the recipe asking to exist.