make video, music and voices on colab

A self-hosted studio that rents a Google Colab L4 only while working.

Colab Studio in image mode: prompt ideas, the composer and the image settings panel — **Images and edits up to 2K.** A prompt enhancer writes the long prompt for you.

A video job waiting while the L4 starts, with live download progress and time left — **Video with sound.** The first prompt starts the L4; downloads, setup steps and the time left show live while the job waits.

Speech mode with two generated clips, one in a cloned voice, and a job in progress — **Speech in 23 languages.** Chatterbox and Qwen3-TTS, and voice cloning from a short recording of one speaker.

which models run out of the box?

Each is a Hugging Face file in models.toml; swap it and restart.

mode	default model	what you get
image	Noct-Q V4 + turbo LoRA	Text to image, and edits
prompt	Qwen3.5 9B prompt enhancer	A short idea, written out
video	MiniMax H3	Video with dialogue and sound
music	YuE2	Songs with vocals
speech	Chatterbox, Qwen3-TTS	Text-to-speech and voice cloning
transcribe	Whisper large-v3-turbo	Audio files to text
3d	TRELLIS.2	A textured GLB from one image

when does the gpu cost you?

Only between your first prompt and the release.

a runtime left open

start
jobs run
idle
idle overnight
still spending

colab studio

first prompt
L4 starts
jobs queue and run
15 idle minutes
L4 released

Results come home before the release. The sidebar shows your compute units and how long they will last.

what do you need?

linux or wsl2: Or Docker. macOS is untested.
colab compute units: Pro, Pro+ or pay as you go.
four tools: curl, ssh, tar, python3.
a hugging face token: Optional, for faster downloads.

before you install

Does the free Colab tier work?

No. The free tier does not offer L4 GPUs. You need Colab compute units: Colab Pro, Pro+ or pay as you go.

Can I use a T4 or an A100 instead?

No. The workflows, VRAM budgets and time estimates were all measured on the L4, so it is the only GPU supported.

Can I open it from my phone?

Yes: through an SSH tunnel, by IP on a trusted network, or on your own domain behind nginx with HTTPS and a password, set up by deploy/setup-nginx.sh.

Where do my results live?

On your own machine. Results are copied back from the GPU and stay after it is released. Chats older than 30 days are deleted automatically.

Can Claude Code use it?

Yes. The mcp folder contains an MCP server, so Claude Code or Claude Desktop can start the GPU, generate media, wait for jobs and look at the results.

Is it made by Google?

No. Colab Studio is an independent open-source project under AGPL-3.0. It uses Google’s official Colab CLI.

how do you install it?

$ git clone https://github.com/berkeduruu/colab-studio.git
$ cd colab-studio
$ ./install.sh && ./run.sh

The installer signs you in to Colab, then open 127.0.0.1:8190 and send a prompt. Prefer containers? See the Docker setup.

get it on github