24 Live Video Effects & 40+ Cinematic Reveals: Buhr Looper's Real-Time FX Engine

You wouldn't play a synth without effects. So why play video dry? Buhr Looper ships a full real-time video FX engine — 24 effects you can throw on the live feed, the loop tiles, or everything at once, plus 40+ cinematic animations for how new loops enter the frame. It's a pedalboard for pictures.

The 24 effects, by mood

Think of them in families:

Shake & impact — Shake Bounce (a beat-like vertical hop), Shake Glitch (sharp digital jumps), Shake Roll (off-axis rotational slip), Crash Zoom (a sudden aggressive punch-in), and Camera Hit (impact shake plus a bright flash). These are your accents — drop them on the snare, the downbeat, the drop.

Glitch & retro — VHS Distort (warped tape bands and drift), TV Static, Digitise (chunky mosaic blocks), Stutter (freeze-frame repeats), Color Invert, and RGB Split (chromatic-aberration channel offsets). Instant lo-fi grit and broken-signal energy.

Light & color — Strobe, Edge Glow (a reactive bright outline), Posterize (bold graphic color steps), and Zoom Blur (a rush-in radial smear). Great for builds and washes.

Trippy & geometric — Kaleidoscope (4-way rotating mirror pattern), Mirror Split (mirrored composition), Feedback Loop (recursive zoom-into-itself), and Clone Trail (delayed ghost copies trailing your motion). For the heads-down, eyes-closed sections.

Reveal & takeover — Dissolve, Fade Out, Full Screen (blow a clip up to fill the stage), and Feed Takeover (slam the live camera full-screen above every tile for the duration). Plus Camera Switcher to hard-cut the live feed to another camera.

Every effect has its own intensity, and a target — apply it to the live feed only, just the overdub tiles, or all loops. You can run up to six effects at once, so layering a subtle VHS under a beat-synced strobe and an edge glow is fair game.

How loops arrive: 40+ entry animations

Effects are how a loop behaves. Entry animations are how a loop is born. When a new clip joins the stage, Buhr Looper can reveal it with one of 40+ animations:

• High-energy: Particle Bloom, Glitch Tear, Crystal Shatter, Neon Pulse, Pixel Cascade, Spiral Vortex, Lightning Flash, Chromatic Wipe, Freeze-Frame Burst.
• Sci-fi & cosmic: Matrix Rain, DNA Helix, Galaxy Swirl, Cosmic Dust, Electric Arc, Phantom Phase, Warp Tunnel, Hologram Flicker, Thermal Fade.
• Elemental: Fire Ember, Liquid Melt, Shatter Reform, Smoke Reveal, Ink Bleed, Wave Ripple.
• Ambient (calm sets): Velvet Drift, Aurora Veil, Silk Drape, Moon Dust, Tidal Glass, Halo Drift, Ember Mist, Prism Veil, Dream Echo, Slow Shutter.

Can't decide? Random Cycle rotates through the whole pool so no two loops enter the same way, and Random Ambient keeps it to the gentle family for downtempo and ambient sets.

Choreograph it: FX that play themselves

Here's the pro move. In Buhr Looper's Automation Lab, you can attach up to three video effects to any block in your performance score, each ramping from a start intensity to an end intensity over the block's length. Build a 16-bar block that slowly cranks Zoom Blur from 0 to full while a Strobe flickers in for the last bar, and your drop lands itself — hands-free, perfectly timed, every show.

That means your visuals can be composed, not just triggered. Program the build once and it fires the same way every night.

Why it feels musical

These aren't generic webcam filters. The shakes hop like a kick, the strobe flashes like a hi-hat, and because the whole stage rides the loop clock, effects you trigger sit in the pocket with the music. You're not decorating a video — you're playing one.

So go ahead: stack a VHS wash, a kaleidoscope, and a beat-synced camera hit. Set new loops to reveal themselves in matrix rain. Then automate the whole thing to bloom on the drop. That's the FX engine — a second set of hands for the part of the show people actually film.

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