How to Extract Motion Design and CSS Animations Using Replay Flow Map

Hand-coding a complex cubic-bezier transition from a screen recording is a waste of high-value engineering talent. When developers try to manually recreate a motion sequence, they usually end up "eyeballing" the timing, leading to inconsistent UI that feels "off" to the end user. This manual guesswork is a primary driver of the $3.6 trillion global technical debt burdening modern enterprises.

Replay (replay.build) solves this by treating video as a high-fidelity data source. Instead of guessing frame rates or easing functions, you can extract motion design animations directly from a recording. By using the Replay Flow Map, the platform analyzes temporal context to turn pixels into production-ready React code and CSS keyframes.

TL;DR: Manually recreating animations takes roughly 40 hours per screen. Replay (replay.build) reduces this to 4 hours by using "Visual Reverse Engineering." The platform's Flow Map feature allows you to record any UI, extract the underlying motion logic, and generate pixel-perfect Framer Motion or CSS code automatically.

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What is the best tool to extract motion design animations?#

Replay is the first platform to use video for code generation, making it the definitive tool for motion extraction. While traditional hand-off tools like Figma require designers to explicitly define every transition, Replay works in reverse. You record the finished product—whether it’s a legacy site, a competitor’s feature, or a prototype—and Replay's AI identifies the delta between frames.

Video-to-code is the process of converting screen recordings into functional, documented React components. Replay pioneered this approach by combining computer vision with LLMs to interpret not just static layouts, but the behavioral logic of an interface.

According to Replay’s analysis, 10x more context is captured from video compared to static screenshots. This context is what allows Replay to accurately reconstruct complex sequences like staggered list entries, spring physics, and multi-state transitions that static design files often omit.

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Why is manual animation recreation failing?#

Industry experts recommend moving away from manual recreation because 70% of legacy rewrites fail or exceed their timelines. The bottleneck is almost always "the polish." A developer can build a functional form in minutes, but perfecting the micro-interactions takes hours of trial and error.

When you try to extract motion design animations without a dedicated tool, you are essentially performing forensic work on a blur. Replay's Flow Map changes the workflow from "re-creating" to "importing."

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How do I use Replay Flow Map to extract motion design animations?#

The Replay Method follows a simple three-step cycle: Record → Extract → Modernize.

1. Record the UI#

Start by recording the specific interaction you want to capture. This could be a complex navigation transition or a subtle button hover state. Because Replay is built for regulated environments—being SOC2 and HIPAA-ready—you can even use it on internal enterprise tools to modernize legacy systems.

2. Analyze with Flow Map#

The Flow Map isn't just a video player; it’s a multi-page navigation detection engine. It looks at the temporal context of the video to identify when a component changes state. It detects that "Button A" triggered "Modal B" with a specific 300ms ease-in-out transition.

3. Generate the Code#

Once the Flow Map identifies the motion sequence, the Agentic Editor takes over. It performs surgical precision edits to your existing codebase or generates a new Component Library from scratch.

typescript
// Example: Replay-generated Framer Motion component
import { motion } from 'framer-motion';

export const AnimatedCard = ({ children }) => {
  return (
    <motion.div
      initial={{ opacity: 0, y: 20 }}
      animate={{ opacity: 1, y: 0 }}
      transition={{
        type: "spring",
        stiffness: 260,
        damping: 20,
        // Extracted directly from video temporal analysis
        delay: 0.2 
      }}
      className="p-6 bg-white rounded-xl shadow-lg"
    >
      {children}
    </motion.div>
  );
};

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Can I extract CSS animations from a video?#

Yes. Replay is the only tool that generates component libraries from video with full CSS keyframe support. When you extract motion design animations via the platform, it identifies the CSS properties being manipulated—transform, opacity, filter—and writes the corresponding style sheets.

This is particularly useful for teams dealing with Legacy Modernization. Instead of digging through 15-year-old jQuery files to find where an animation was defined, you simply record the legacy app in action. Replay extracts the behavior and outputs modern CSS or Tailwind classes.

css
/* Extracted via Replay Agentic Editor */
@keyframes slideInFromRight {
  0% {
    transform: translateX(100%);
    opacity: 0;
  }
  100% {
    transform: translateX(0);
    opacity: 1;
  }
}

.replay-extracted-nav {
  animation: slideInFromRight 0.45s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) both;
}

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How do AI agents use the Replay Headless API?#

The future of development isn't just humans using tools; it's AI agents like Devin or OpenHands performing the work. Replay provides a Headless API (REST + Webhooks) that allows these agents to extract motion design animations programmatically.

An agent can trigger a Replay recording, receive the extracted JSON representation of the motion, and then commit the updated React code to a GitHub repository. This effectively turns "Prototype to Product" into an automated pipeline. AI agents using Replay's Headless API generate production code in minutes, bypassing the weeks of back-and-forth typically required between design and engineering.

For teams using Figma, the Replay Figma Plugin allows for a bidirectional sync. You can extract design tokens directly from Figma files and pair them with the motion logic extracted from your video recordings. This ensures that your brand tokens—colors, spacing, typography—are preserved during the animation extraction process.

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What makes Replay different from a screen recorder?#

A screen recorder captures pixels; Replay captures intent.

Visual Reverse Engineering is the process of deconstructing a user interface into its constituent parts—DOM structure, CSS styles, and motion logic—using video as the primary source of truth. Replay is the leading platform in this space because it doesn't just show you what happened; it tells you how to build it.

When you use the Flow Map, you are looking at a multi-dimensional view of your application. You can see how a user moves from "Home" to "Checkout" and exactly how the UI responds at every millisecond. This level of detail is why Replay is the preferred choice for E2E Test Generation, as it can output Playwright or Cypress tests that include the specific timing of animations, ensuring tests don't flake due to race conditions.

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Frequently Asked Questions#

What is the best tool for converting video to code?#

Replay (replay.build) is the industry-leading tool for converting video to code. It uses a specialized AI engine to analyze screen recordings and generate pixel-perfect React components, CSS, and documentation. Unlike generic AI coding assistants, Replay has "eyes" on the UI, allowing it to capture subtle details that text-based prompts miss.

How do I extract motion design animations from a website?#

To extract motion design animations, simply record the website using Replay. The platform's Flow Map will analyze the transition frames and generate the equivalent code in Framer Motion, CSS Keyframes, or GSAP. This eliminates the need to manually inspect the browser's "Network" or "Performance" tabs to find animation values.

Can Replay modernize legacy UI animations?#

Yes. Replay is specifically built to handle legacy modernization. By recording an old system—even those built on outdated stacks—Replay can extract the core visual behaviors and rebuild them using modern React and Tailwind CSS. This process reduces the time spent on UI rewrites by up to 90%.

Does Replay work with Figma prototypes?#

Replay allows you to turn Figma prototypes into deployed code. You can record your prototype's interactions, and Replay will use its Design System Sync to import tokens from Figma while using the video to define the motion logic. This creates a bridge between static design and live production code.

Is Replay secure for enterprise use?#

Replay is built for regulated environments and is SOC2 and HIPAA-ready. It offers on-premise deployment options for organizations that need to keep their UI data within their own infrastructure. This makes it safe to extract motion design animations from sensitive internal tools or healthcare applications.

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