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Create narrated KPI summary videos from reports with Claude Opus and Shotstack

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Created by: Jesus Rojas || jesus-shotstack
Jesus Rojas

Last update

Last update 6 hours ago

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Quick overview

Drop a monthly update, board deck or sales export and get a 2 to 4 minute narrated 16:9 video: chapters, KPI tiles, charts and captions, all built from the report's numbers. Reads PowerPoint, Word, PDF, Excel, CSV and text. Self-hosted n8n only: it reads and saves files on disk.

How it works

  1. Downloads Shotstack's guide for AI agents, then reads the file named in Your report and turns it into text. Slides, PDF pages, sheets and tables all come through.
  2. Claude Opus 5.5 plans the story and writes the whole Shotstack edit: 3 to 6 chapters, KPI tiles with their change against last month and the target, charts, lists of what shipped, and one voice line per scene.
  3. Check the edit fixes small problems and sends anything bigger back to Claude, before anything costs money.
  4. One Shotstack render makes the voice one sentence at a time and starts each scene exactly when its sentence does, with captions underneath.
  5. If Shotstack refuses the edit or the render fails, Claude reads the reason and fixes the edit, up to twice. The finished MP4 is saved to the videos folder.

Setup

  1. Install the Shotstack community node from the nodes panel or Settings → Community nodes, then import this workflow.
  2. Add your Anthropic API key to Claude and Claude (fixes). It uses Claude Opus 5.5, so pick another model there if your account doesn't have it. Add your Shotstack API key to Make the video and Check the render. Free trial: https://shotstack.io/?utm_source=n8n&utm_medium=template&utm_campaign=report-videos&utm_content=description
  3. Make a reports folder in n8n's files folder (/home/node/.n8n-files in Docker), put your report in it, and make an empty videos folder inside it. On an npm install, change the path in Read the report and Save the short to your own files folder.
  4. Fill in Your report: the file name, your company, your brand colours and who will watch the video. Then click Execute workflow.

Requirements

  • Self-hosted n8n, because the workflow reads and saves files on disk
  • The Shotstack community node, version 0.2.1 or later
  • A Shotstack API key.
  • An Anthropic API key, or another chat model n8n supports

Customization

  • Change the audience in Your report, for example "the board" or "the whole company", and Claude changes the tone and depth to match
  • Edit the brief in Claude makes the video to change the length, the number of chapters or the visual style
  • Start from Google Drive and save the video back there to run it on n8n Cloud
  • Add a Schedule Trigger to make a video of each month's report automatically