Tag Archives: blues

05.14.11
by

Reaper as a video editor

I found out this morning that with a couple of extra free DLLs installed, that Reaper can be used as a video editor too.

None of my cameras are able to accept an external audio source, so previously anything I’ve recorded has been done with the crappy in-built mic. To get round this I went looking for how I could sync up something I had recorded in Reaper, with the video that my camera had taken at the same time and I stumbled on this post.

This lead me to Cockos’ Reaper wiki, which has the very simple instructions. Effectively you download the relevant DLL’s from http://aegiscorp.free.fr/ffmpeg/ or http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org/builds/. Unzip the four DLLs into “C:Program Files/REAPER”. Restart Reaper and then you can insert a video file – just as you would insert an audio or midi file. It can also render the combined audio/video to an avi file.

So here’s the basic process;

  • Start Reaper,
  • Insert a new track and arm it for recording,
  • Start recording on Reaper,
  • Start the camera recording,
  • Make a sharp noise that has an accompanying visual element, something like a hand clap worked fine for me – it is the low cost version of the film world’s clapper board,
  • Do your stuff,
  • Stop recording on the camera and in Reaper,
  • Transfer video file from camera to PC,
  • Insert a new track in Reaper (ctrl-T), and import the video onto it (Ins),
  • Toggle off snapping (Options->Enable Snapping),
  • Grab the audio or video track and drag it left/right to align the hand-clap,
  • Trim as necessary,
  • File->Render and choose AVI as output file type.

One thing to bear in mind, that had me stumped for a few minutes… I wanted to replace the audio track of the video recording and so used the mute button. This also “mutes” the video and so leaves you with a black screen. If you turn down the audio using the fader then the video remains.

And here is my first output using this technique.

Special thanks to the Six String Bliss forum‘s very own Shawn Hudgell, our South Korean correspondant, who taught me how to make bottleneck slides.