Being able to import a video in a DAW not very common. Being able to add video FX in a DAW is pretty rare. And being able to code video effects in a DAW is pretty unique ; and this is how far you can go in REAPER!
When making sounds for a video, adding FX to video in a DAW is quite handy, to display various information, to adjust image colors etc can be quite handy, but you can also push it and do the full editing and rendering of your video projects from REAPER, without using any regular video editing software, taking advantage of editing flow and features (scripting, MIDI…) of a lightweight DAW like REAPER. Jon from ReaperBlog edit his videos on REAPER, for eg.
Video FX in REAPER are embeded into an FX called Video Processor, a minimal code editor FX (a bit scary for people on used to see code), code which performs on videos content of items. It comes with basic presets like positioning, color correction, and text stuffs (counters etc).
Despite a pretty basic function set, some coders of the community jumped on this and made various Video Processor FX. I made a few of them myself, and I can assure you, it is not that easy!
Among top contributors, there is Papagirafe, who made various advanced FX, with a degree of understanding of the ins and outs of video processor far superior than anyone else.
Seing the limits basic presets of the Video Processor, Papagirafe went into a long journey of making a utilitarian Video FX library, to push Video FX to a next level. The result just came out, as a library called GiraFX!
Here are the main features of GiraFX (copy pasted from the release post):
- Introduction of a video mixer that make video mixing behave almost like audio
- positions & dimensions of video objects in % of the selected canvas or source size
- extremely advanced and flexible positioning system for video elements
- consistent transparency handling with non leaky crossfades
- text: shared style definition, flexible text alignment, ability to display only one line at a time out of a large text
- up to 9 sub-canvas (aka video mixers) that can sub-divide your main visual space into regions
For sure, GiraFX is quite advanced, so you may not need it for basic usage of Video FX in REAPER, but it can really help if you are building a full video editing workflow. These presets have been released as paid scripts, to support its very long and intensive development. It is packed with various video tutorials, which is very welcome for such complex library.
REAPER video editing is far from perfect. We miss some features like thumbnails on the arrange view as seen in regular video editor softwares, and for which workarounds are not ideal; there is no GPU based calculation for decoding and encoding etc… But such Video Processor FX library can bring the spotlight back to REAPER video editing features and maybe invite Cockos to make some stuffs there. 😉
You can discuss with Papagirafe on the Cockos forum GiraFX thread, and click on the link below to go to the website of the project.
Have fun ! 🦒
Feature Image Credits: Papagirafe