Decks (AI presentation builder) (part 4)

What it is

Motion design is a layer on top of a finished deck: for each slide an AI writes a description of the movement (entrances, builds one point at a time, emphasis, the transition to the next slide), and a small player that ships with Decks performs it wherever the deck plays. The narrated video uses that motion and the slides' own speaker notes: the voice service set up in Omniscio reads the notes, each build lands on the sentence it belongs to, and captions show the notes' words. The AI is told to choreograph rather than template: the slide's main idea moves most (a headline can build word by word), supporting text moves less, the page number and other fixed labels never move, lines draw while bars grow and text lifts, and moves overlap so the slide reads as one gesture. Both are real AI work, so each starts with one honest warning and runs under the deck's spending stop. The first part of this page, decks.md, covers how a deck is built.

Where to find it

• Motion & video is a button in the deck editor's header, after Share. On a narrow screen the same items are inside More deck actions (the … button), and the two menus always offer the same things.
• The items appear only on a finished deck. A menu item that cannot be used is shown greyed out with the reason as its tooltip (for example "Every slide has motion. Remove it to design it again." or "Add speaker notes first: the video reads them aloud.").
• Which AI designs motion and video is on the Decks card in Settings → Plugins.

How it behaves

Motion design

• Add motion design… opens the warning; Start motion design runs it. The AI first settles one motion style for the whole deck, then designs each slide, plays it, looks at it and fixes it. When some slides already have motion the item reads Finish motion design (N left)….
• Decks hands each slide over itself. It puts the slide, a copy the AI can read whole (large inlined pictures left out) and the preview tools in a folder for the AI, so the AI never copies a slide: a slide with a big picture no longer runs out of time, and each slide takes less time and usage than when the AI copied it. The AI names its own working folder; Decks checks the answer, Omniscio lets Decks write only inside Decks' own data folder (or a folder the person chose to give it), and each slide's files are deleted as soon as that slide is done.
• The slides are never changed. Motion is stored beside each slide, never in it: the slide's words, pictures, look and speaker notes stay exactly as they were, and Remove motion… takes motion off every slide in one step after asking.
• Where it plays: Present, the HTML download and the share link. The editor shows slides still, and the PDF, the PowerPoint file and every thumbnail show each slide's finished look.
• In Present: Next (or a click) plays the slide's next build before moving to the next slide. Each press does one new thing: a press that lands while a build is still playing starts the next build at once, and a press made while a slide is still loading is kept and applied when it is ready. Slides change through the deck's declared transition, including slides with no motion of their own, and a slide is shown only once it has loaded, so the screen never goes blank between slides (a slide that has not loaded within four seconds is cut to). Going back shows the previous slide fully built; M, or Play motion in the toolbar, switches motion off for the rest of the talk.
• Reduced motion: on a device set to reduce motion, movement becomes gentle fades and builds still appear in order.
• A slide edited afterwards plays still. It says "This slide changed after its motion was designed, so it plays still" under the toolbar, with Redo its motion… for that slide alone.
• Nothing the AI writes runs. It writes a description of movement, never code. Decks checks every hand-back and refuses anything else, and the only script a slide runs is Decks' own player, locked by its fingerprint so nothing else can run beside it.

The narrated video

• Make a narrated video… opens the warning; Make the video runs it. Slides without motion get motion first, then one AI turn ties each build to its sentence, and the voice reads the notes one sentence at a time (a very long sentence is read in pieces at its own pauses).
• It needs speaker notes and a voice: a voice set up in Omniscio under Settings → Voice, used with the person's own key. Without one, the warning says where to add it and Start stays off.
• Once made: Watch the video (inside Decks), Download the video page (HTML) (one file that plays in any browser), Share the video (a public link), Save as an MP4 video, and Remove the video… (deletes the video and its narration; slides and motion stay). It plays in Omniscio's one video player everywhere.
• A stale video is never played. Change a slide, a note or a motion after the video was made and Watch, Download, Share and MP4 turn off with "The deck changed after this video was made. Make the video again."
• MP4: Omniscio records the film into an MP4 file (1920×1080, 30 frames a second, with sound) at a place the person chooses, with progress and Cancel under the header. It takes a little less than the video's length (measured: a 10-minute film in about 9 minutes on one computer). Only an Omniscio newer than every release made before this feature can do it; older ones keep the item off with "Saving an MP4 needs a newer Omniscio. The video still plays here, downloads and shares." A computer without the video tools yet gets them installed by Omniscio itself.

The warning before anything is spent

Start is never the default button and Enter never presses it. The warning shows:

• AI model — on an Omniscio that can say which model will run, Decks names it and checks it before any paid turn, and never starts a lighter one. On Omniscio 0.1.110 and older it cannot check, says so, lists the three ways the default could quietly be lighter, and asks the person to tick "I've checked that Omniscio uses Claude Opus 5.5 or newer".
• This deck — how many slides the AI will design. Time and usage per deck have not been measured on real runs yet, so the warning shows no figure rather than a guess.
• Spending stop — whether the deck's stop is set, and where.
• For the video — who reads the notes, how many sentences and about how long they run, what the voice may cost across the voice services Omniscio supports, whether that could pass Omniscio's daily voice limit for Decks, and whether the video may be too long to share as a link.

Which AI does the work

Which AI designs motion and video offers Use Omniscio's default, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1, separately from Which AI builds your decks, which it never follows. An older Omniscio ignores this setting (the setting says so) and the warning asks the person to confirm the model.

Cost, stopping and the spending stop

• Runs use AI on the person's Omniscio account like a deck build, and appear in the normal spend view; the narration also uses their own voice service and key.
• A run stops at the deck's spending stop and says so; slides already finished keep their motion, and spending more takes a new Start through the warning. Stop on the status line under the header ends a run at any moment; a video stopped before it finished keeps no narration.
• The run works inside the Decks screen, and the warning asks to keep Decks open: closing Decks, opening another plugin in its place or popping it out stops it. Once Decks is open again, a run left that way is marked stopped ("Decks was closed while it ran") once it has been silent five minutes, in the inbox and on its deck (unless a later run was started there), and a video's partial narration is removed; a film it had already kept is said as made. A run whose own final write fails is recorded as failed with the real reason, never as closed.
• A run that cannot hand a slide over (Decks cannot save it where the AI can open it) stops at once with "Decks could not save the slides where the AI can open them, so it stopped before spending more." It costs at most one slide's AI session, and slides already finished keep their motion.
• Before each send the run's row records its session, the turn and the usage so far. When a lost run is ended, a reply that had already arrived whole is kept (a slide's motion only if the slide is unchanged and still has none; the motion style only if the deck has none), its usage is recorded and its sessions deleted; nothing is sent. A session still answering is waited for up to its turn's limit, and meanwhile the deck holds motion design and the video with a plain reason. A row that cannot be read is still the screen's own.
• Picked up where it stopped. When the deck of a lost run is opened, Decks starts that run again by itself: the author's own earlier Start, with the same warning, the Opus 5.5 check and the spending stop. Its line and its inbox row open with "Picked up where it stopped: slide 3 of 18", the first slide the pickup will design at its place in the deck (no pick-up when nothing is left to design), and Stop ends it as stopped by the author. It pays for nothing twice: motion is designed only for slides without it and the style is reused; a video speaks only the sentences the lost run did not keep and reuses the cue answers it had settled while each slide is unchanged. The spending stop counts what the lost run had already used, and the pickup's line says what the pickup took and what the whole run took. When the deck is busy the run is not picked up, and the deck's line says so ("Not picked up automatically: this deck is busy. Press Finish when it is free."). Only a run that was lost is picked up, never one the author stopped, one that hit the spending stop, one that failed or finished, or a pickup that was itself lost; with Decks open in two windows, one of them picks it up.
• One AI run per deck at a time, so motion design and a video never run on one deck together.
• When a run finishes or stops on its own, an inbox message says so with what it cost (unless Send inbox alerts is off).
• While a run goes, one inbox row follows it: the slide, the step and the cost so far, updated in place, then closed with how it ended (finished, or stopped unexpectedly at a slide; a run you stop yourself leaves no row). The cost is the AI usage only; a video's voice is billed by the voice service and not included. What a run has spent is also saved as it goes, so a run cut short still shows it.

The update and its new permission

The Decks update that adds this (1.3.0) asks for one new permission, tts (voice), used only to read speaker notes aloud for a narrated video through the voice service set up in Omniscio. An update that adds a permission is not applied unattended: it waits in Omniscio's Updates list until the person approves a consent screen that names it.

Where its code and data live

• Island: src/plugins/decks/src/deck-model/deck-motion*.ts (the spec, its gate, the turns, the locked player, transitions), deck-video-*.ts and deck-film-document.ts (the narration plan, the film page), src/plugins/decks/src/lib/decks-run-sessions.ts (the model pin, usage and spending stop), decks-motion-*.ts, decks-video-*.ts, decks-film-*.ts, decks-voice.ts, and the screens MotionWarningDialog.tsx, MotionMenu.tsx, VideoControls.tsx, RunControls.tsx and PresentMotion.tsx. The film plays in a copy of Omniscio's player at src/plugins/decks/src/vendor/omniscio-video-player.ts.
• Host (the MP4 saver): src/main/services/decks-plugin-host/deck-video-export.ts, deck-video-film.ts and deck-video-encode.ts, reached through the decks.exportVideo, decks.videoExportStatus and decks.cancelVideoExport bridge calls and offered only where the host lists the decks-video-export capability.
• Storage: deck_cards.motion, decks.motion_language, and the collections deck_motion_runs, deck_videos and deck_video_clips (one narration clip per row, so each stays under the host's 1 MiB record limit). Removing the video or deleting the deck removes them.
• How it all fits together, and where a change bites: .claude/memory/decks-motion-and-video-map.md; what must stay true: .claude/memory/contracts/decks-motion-and-video-contract.md.

Related

The first part of this page covers what Decks is and how a deck is built, part 2 covers presenting, speaker notes, export and cost, and part 3 covers how Decks is installed and what its plugin panel reaches on the host.