---
title: Music videos and slideshows
description: "Two music- and slide-driven outputs that look alike in a brief but ship differently — a beat-synced MP4 versus a navigable deck — and how to route to the right one."
---

import { DocsVideo } from "/snippets/docs-video.jsx";

You've dressed footage and turned a PR into a story — now the driving input changes again: a track's own beat, or a deck of slides, sets the pace instead of a script.

## Your first win

One prompt to [`/music-to-video`](/prompting/overview), pointed at a track and some photos, is enough for a finished beat-synced video — no technique required yet.

The verified starting point: photos cut to a track, exported to a square MP4.

> /music-to-video 20-second 1080x1080 video from ./track.mp3 (pick the best 20 seconds of the track) and the 8 photos in ./shots/. Cut on the beat grid, one photo per bar, punch-in on downbeats, `whip-pan` transitions on phrase changes. End on the last photo with "SUMMER '26" in condensed caps. No TTS.

<DocsVideo
  title="HyperFrames video: Example Music Slideshow"
  src="https://static.heygen.ai/hyperframes-oss/docs/images/prompting/example-music-slideshow-v2.mp4#t=0.1"
  loop
/>
*Rendered from the prompt above, unedited.*


Every timing decision here is delegated to the track's own analysis — you describe the *treatment* ("one photo per bar", "punch-in on downbeats"), and the beat grid supplies the *times*.

## Two outputs that a brief blurs together

"Make a slideshow from these photos and this track" and "make a slideshow deck for my pitch" both say *slideshow*, but they produce different things and route to different workflows. Name the output you want up front.

| You want | Route | Output |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Photos / clips cut to a music track, exported as a video | `/music-to-video` | A beat-synced **MP4** with audio |
| A presentation you click through — slides, reveals, speaker notes | `/slideshow` | A **navigable deck**, not an MP4 |

`/music-to-video` turns a **music track** — an audio file, a video to pull audio from, or a track generated from a mood brief — into a beat-synced video. The music drives all pacing; any photos or clips you supply are cut onto the same beat grid, and a complete video needs zero assets (typography carries it otherwise). There is no narration and no website capture.

`/slideshow` authors a HyperFrames deck — discrete slides with fragment reveals, hotspot branching, and a built-in presenter mode with speaker notes. Its output is the **running deck**, served with `hyperframes present`. Do not point `render` at a deck: it resolves only the first scene and emits a silently truncated MP4. If the user didn't explicitly ask for a slideshow, the skill confirms the deck route before authoring — that's a routing decision, not a style preference. One authoring detail worth knowing: fragment reveal times are absolute positions on the deck's master timeline, not per-slide offsets.

## The knobs that matter

What you can already steer from the prompt, before you've learned any technique.

**The beat grid.** `/music-to-video` analyzes the track once into energy phases, onsets, rolls, silences, hard stops, and phrases, then cuts at real musical changes. You steer *how* it cuts, not *when*: "one photo per bar" sets cut density, "punch-in on downbeats" adds the accent, "transitions on phrase changes" reserves the visible moves for structural boundaries. On genuinely rhythmic music the grid is trustworthy and cuts snap to the beat; on calm music the grid is a metronome the analyzer imposed, so the skill paces by phrase and energy instead of hard-cutting — say "let it flow, no hard cuts" if the track is ambient.

**Track section — describe, don't timestamp.** Ask for "the best 20 seconds" or "the verse into the hook" and let the analyzer choose boundaries that land on musical anchors. Hard timestamps ("use 0:32–0:52") cut mid-phrase and fight the grid.

**Asset supply.** Zero assets is valid — typography and templates carry a complete video. Any photos or clips you hand it are woven in *on the same beat grid* (beat-cut or Ken Burns), so more assets means more to cut between, not a different pacing model. Point at a directory ("the 8 photos in ./shots/") and name the end card.

**Deck structure (slideshow).** Fragments (reveal hold-points), hotspots + branch sequences (off-line detail slides), and presenter notes are the deck's structural knobs. Ask for them by name — "reveal the bullets as fragments", "branch to a detail slide from a hotspot", "add speaker notes" — and the island wiring follows.

## Variants

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Lyric video">
    > /music-to-video 30-second 1080x1920 lyric video from ./song.mp3 (pick the strongest 30-second section — a verse into the hook). Transcribe the vocals for word timing. Lines rise in one at a time on the beat, big condensed type on a dark grain background; the hook lands with each word punching in on its downbeat. Keyword in each line highlighted in acid green. No photos — typography only. No TTS.

    Word-level timing comes from transcribing the track (or from lyrics you paste, placed on the beat grid). No supplied assets needed — type is the whole video.
  </Accordion>
  <Accordion title="Kinetic promo from a mood brief (no track)">
    > /music-to-video 15-second 1080x1080 kinetic promo. No track supplied — generate one: driving synthwave, high energy. Cut hard on the beat: full-frame word cards ("FASTER", "SHARPER", "SHIP IT") slam in on downbeats, alternating black/white with inverted type, a glitch flash on each phrase change. End on the wordmark "NOVA" holding with a subtle ambient idle. No TTS.

    With no audio supplied, the track is generated from the mood you describe; the beat grid it produces still drives every cut. Fast, high-energy briefs suit this workflow best.
  </Accordion>
  <Accordion title="Presentation deck (slideshow)">
    > /slideshow Build a 5-slide pitch deck, 1920x1080. One idea per slide, each headline a complete-sentence claim (not a label), punchline first. Slide 2 reveals three pain points one at a time as fragments. Slide 3 shows bottom-up market math (accounts × ACV), not a bare "$40B TAM". Add presenter notes to every slide, and a hotspot on slide 3 that branches to a "sizing methodology" detail slide. I'll present it with `hyperframes present`.

    This produces a clickable deck, not a video. Fragments are reveal hold-points inside a slide; the hotspot branches off the main line and returns on Back. Headlines follow the deck's hard rules — complete-sentence claims, one idea + one visual per slide, font no smaller than a 30pt equivalent.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Failure modes

**Hard track timestamps.** The whole point of `/music-to-video` is that the track's structure sets the cuts. A literal time window ignores the analyzed beat grid and lands cuts mid-phrase.
- ❌ `use the section from 0:32 to 0:52`
- ✅ `pick the best 20 seconds of the track`

**Expecting an MP4 from `/slideshow`.** A deck is authored as several top-level scenes with no master-root composition, so `render` resolves only the first one and truncates. The supported outputs are the live `present` deck and per-slide snapshots.
- ❌ `/slideshow ... then render it to deck.mp4`
- ✅ `/slideshow ... I'll present it with hyperframes present` — or, if you actually need a rendered video, use `/music-to-video` (beat-synced) or `/general-video`.

**Wrong workflow for the output.** Photos set to music that you'll export and post is `/music-to-video`; a thing you click through live is `/slideshow`. Picking by the word "slideshow" alone builds the wrong deliverable.

<Tip>
  Both prompts here are unnarrated. `/music-to-video` has no TTS by design; if you want a spoken voice-over instead of a music bed, that's a different workflow (see the router in `/hyperframes`). For the six-part skeleton these prompts share, see [Prompt anatomy](/prompting/anatomy); for adjectives that map to eases and transitions, [Vocabulary](/prompting/vocabulary).
</Tip>

<Note>
**Capstone thread** — the [Level 7 film](/prompting/capstone)'s Rhythm region cuts media cards onto a real analyzed beat grid from `hyperframes beats` — the film's only sanctioned hard cuts, every one on a detected beat while the camera keeps traveling (cut from the film, below).
</Note>

This is the clause in the [full capstone prompt](/prompting/capstone#the-prompt-word-for-word) that buys the piece — prompt language you can lift for your own video:

> **Rhythm (45–52s).** The wire becomes a waveform: **resolve the BGM first, run `hyperframes beats` on it, and drive this region on the detected grid** — the waveform pulses and compact media cards (a lyric line, a photo card, a chart flash) snap onto the wire on real analyzed beats while the camera keeps traveling; each snap gets a tick SFX. At least six beat-hits. SANCTIONED SEAM #2: the beat-hits may hard-cut card content ON the beat — the sanctioned exception, because the camera itself never stops moving through them.

<DocsVideo
  title="HyperFrames video: Capstone Region Rhythm"
  src="https://static.heygen.ai/hyperframes-oss/docs/images/prompting/capstone-region-rhythm.mp4#t=0.1"
  loop
/>
*That clause, rendered — the region cut from the finished film.*

The workflow this level rides is documented at [Music to video](/guides/music-to-video) — what it takes as input, what it asks you before it builds, and what it returns.

*Next: [Motion graphics](/prompting/motion-graphics) — the shortest one yet, a single motion graphic where motion alone is the message.*
