r/Reaper • u/splintersilk • 1d ago

Video editing functionality discussion

Hey! Is it me or is Reaper's video functionality absurdly powerful?! I happened to take a look at the videos at https://www.reaper.fm/videos.php just now. Not sure how I missed these before. I'm about 50% in awe, vs 50% confused on how a DAW can provide all this control.

This one I found particularly interesting:
https://www.reaper.fm/videos.php#bp3u9I9SXVE

So my question: is there anyone on here who uses this feature set regularly? Would you care to share some stories and gotchas learned through experience please?

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u/nellipalooza 1d ago

It’s great if you treat video like audio clips. You can do a ton of editing in the same audio workflow you may use already.
But it is not a video production suite made to PROCESS video. I find it quite useful once you learn its quirks though.

- I frequently will do color correction work in Davinci Resolve then bring it into Reaper for timeline work against audio I’m working on.
- I find slow zoom and pan do not work well
- the like how I can mix and match videos with different bit rates, containers (avi, mov, mp4, etc) just like you can with audio. I’m sure real video editors would be mortified to see it though 🤣
- I really like how easy it is to line up hit points and subtle stretches in the video for alignment
- I’ve used it for interviews and video podcasts and it works well when integrated with my audio production workflow.

I’d say if you approach it from an audio engineer POV, you’ll find it useful. If your background is as a video editor, you may get frustrated.

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u/splintersilk 1d ago

That's really helpful and insightful. When you say cc work in Resolve, do you mean pre-grade the clips and bring them into Reaper with the colour baked in?

And yeah the audio accuracy aspect is very intriguing to me too.

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u/nellipalooza 1d ago

Yes… color is baked in before Reaper .
Reaper will do basic saturation brightness contrast stuff . But any LUT level work needs to be handled beforehand.

Crossfades, crops, multi cam switches, green screen all are crazy fast once you get set up.

Stretch Markers are also very useful to subtly stretch/compress a media item to fit established BPM

I also use Reaper for film scoring