The REAPER Blog Q&A #25 | Making plugins, REAPER video features, destructive editing and more

In this round of Q&A Jon answers your questions on: Making plugins, reaper video features, destructive editing and more!

00:20 – Thanking Booth Junkie
00:35 – Q1 – Have you ever thought about designing your own plugin? From Mathew

A1 -A Few years ago I had the idea for a plugin to sum the low frequencies to mono. Back then it was a more difficult task than it is now. Today you can do that with VUMT Deluxe, Ozone, the Toneboosters EQ and many others.

If I had a good plugin idea I would work with a developer, someone that’s made plugins before as a partnership. I wouldn’t learn how to make it myself.

01:30 – Q2 – What video editing capabilities does reaper have? From Carl

A2 – There’s a lot of things that Reaper can do for video editing. Primarily you’re going to be cutting longer clips into shorter clips and you can do that so easily with groups editing and ripple editing ,and it’s basically just the same as cutting audio so that’s a huge advantage over video specific programs, because none of them do grouping properly, most of them don’t do ripple editing properly. Having both of those features plus the ability of making custom actions, having everything you do with the mouse and keyboard totally customizable… that’s what makes reaper a better video editor for me.

Reaper can also add in titles we can do some basic color adjustments, different types of transitions, you can use stretch markers on video items to create dynamic slow-motion effects. So Reaper can do a lot with video but it can’t do some kind of advanced things, masking and compositing, using different  blending modes way that stacked video clips actually interact with each other. We don’t have video scopes so we can’t see any details of what’s coming off of the video in terms of color or brightness.

Adding text titles to to a video is kind of a pain in the ass, a lot of the stuff like when I do the Q&A videos I’m doing all the text in a image editor and then importing that as a PNG file just because it’s a little easier. I can actually customize a formatting a lot easier in that but the majority of the stuff in my videos is all done inside Reaper or done with a camera.

If you want to do computer-generated things you gotta go elsewhere, if you want to do moving titles or titles that follow the, action or any sort of motion graphic stuff you got to look elsewhere.

I’m confident with the tools that are  available inside Reaper and a bit of creativity you can you can edit a short film, you can edit a documentary without much trouble. The main benefit is that it has such great audio editing and processing features and the video stuff is it’s more basic but really it’s all you need to tell a story.

04:05 – Q3 – Reaper plugin to analyze what a compressor does? From Cornelis

A3 – Reaper actually has a plugin called the Gain Reduction Scope and you can put that after a compressor. Send that plug-in the same signal plus the output of the compressor and you can see how the signal has changed going through that compressor. We can use this to analyze the attack and release times and things like that. I showed that plug-in when it was released. I’ve also heard that kind of inside of Reapers are going to change something so that compressor gain reduction can be shown in some way either in a plug-in or in or actually like in the Reapers theme. That’s kind of interesting but it’s not out yet so when that’s out maybe we’ll come back to that gain reduction plug-in as well.

04:55 – Q4 – Editing audio, external editor, destructive editing? From Andrew

A4 – Mostly I stay inside of Reaper, non-destructive works great for the way that I like to work.

If the plug-in versions of the RX tools aren’t working on the track or on the individual items I’ll send that file over to rx (I have a video on using external editors ) and I’ll do the click removal or spectral repair and things like that. I’d say I only do that in like one in twenty different projects. Definitely do it more when working on film stuff than like normal audio recording projects.

I’ll do a lot of item volume automation as a way of doing sort of waveform manipulation.

We have spectral editing on the track and I’ve used that a few times as well. I’m trying to use that instead of RX in a lot of cases, just because it’s it’s right there. But I don’t think the quality is quite there compared to RX so if I wanted to sound good I got to go to RX and it’s usually worth the extra effort.

06:15 – Q5 – Can you go too far with acoustic treatment? Measuring room acoustics. From Pete

A5 – You have to analyze your room with some sort of room measurement software and a calibrated microphone. Room EQ wizard is one common one that’s pretty easy to use. It’s design a tone at a specific volume out of your speakers, it gets picked up by the microphone and then it compares the source signal to the frequency content of the recorded signal, and then it plots that on a graph as either frequency response or a waterfall graph. A Waterfall graph shows frequency over time.

Most of my acoustic treatment I built when I was in a smaller room, and I had two inch fiberglass pretty much all around my mixing position. I measured and found that the high frequencies were being attenuated way too much. I ended up replacing the side panels of my mixing position with diffusion and that controlled the sound but it did not kill the high frequencies. It scatters the sound so you don’t get that harsh flutter echo. The next time I measured it was much flatter a much more even response.

The low frequencies are going to be the hardest part so you want to have lots of treatment in the corners and behind your speakers. Any parallel walls you want to have some sort of treatment especially around your mixing position.

When you’re measuring, if you run into issues where it sounds really dark or it’s the graph is just like a steep cutoff in the high frequencies try moving some of the panel’s away or use diffusion. It takes a lot to treat the low-frequency problems of a room and sometimes it’s it can be overkill for the higher frequencies. For me the solution was to switch to diffusion in some areas of the room.

08:40 – Thanking Patrons

Links

REAPER Blog Q&A series – Full Playlist

Booth Junkie – 2 favors to ask of you

REAPER Video editing features – Playlist of REAPER Blog tutorials on video production

REAPER Gain Reduction Scope Plugin  – What’s New in REAPER v5.29

External audio editor setup

Room EQ Wizard – REW Website

Room Measuring tutorials

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