Video Capture & Effects
✨ New in homecrate 1.12. If you don’t see it yet, update from the App Store.
Homecrate can film you playing. You hit record, your backing track starts, your mic records, and the camera rolls — all at the same time. When you stop, Homecrate renders the video back to you with the audio already mixed, through your master chain, exactly as you heard it in your headphones. No editing app, no re-syncing, no lining up a clap.
On top of that sits a real-time video effects engine: 62 effects running on the GPU that you stack as layers, with two “shields” that can keep the chaos off you and off your instrument, and per-layer parameters that can be driven by the music you’re playing.
🔒 Pro feature. Video capture and effects are available with Homecrate Pro. Free users see Record video locked in the ⋯ menu.
Opening the Camera
Stop the transport, then tap ⋯ menu → Record video. A floating camera panel appears that you can drag anywhere on screen.
[SCREENSHOT: Camera panel floating over the timeline — preview, transport, FX button]
A few things to know up front:
- The camera can only be opened while the transport is stopped. Once it’s open, it drives playback itself.
- It’s not available in Spatial Mode — switch back to the Audio tab first.
- The panel is draggable, so park it wherever it doesn’t cover the part of the timeline you’re watching.
Recording a Performance
Tap record in the camera panel and three things start together:
- Your project’s backing track plays
- Your armed track’s live mic / instrument input records
- The camera rolls
Play your part, then stop. Homecrate immediately renders the result:
- It mixes your project down through the master insert chain, so the backing track in the video sounds like your mix — not a dry, un-processed version of it.
- It combines the video with the backing mix and your live performance audio into one file.
- You get Backing and Mic volume sliders so you can balance the two before you save. Push Mic up if you’re demoing a part; push Backing up if you’re showing off the song.
[SCREENSHOT: Post-record review — video preview with Backing and Mic balance sliders]
Then tap Save to Photos (on iPhone and iPad) or pick a location with the document picker (on Mac). The exported file is an MP4, so it drops straight into any editor or uploader.
Note: There’s also a screen recording path if you want to capture the app itself rather than the camera — useful for tutorials and for showing what your hands are doing on the timeline.
Framing: Cameras and Crops
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Flip | Switch between the front and back camera |
| Multi-cam | Record front and back cameras at once, combined into a single frame (front on top, back below in portrait) |
| Crop | Frame the shot for where it’s going: Off, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 16:9 |
| Alignment | Drag to choose which part of the frame the crop keeps |
The crop is applied to the preview and to the recording, so what you frame is what you get — no cropping afterwards in another app.
[SCREENSHOT: Crop mode row with 9:16 selected and the crop window dragged off-center]
Limitation: Multi-cam and video effects can’t run at the same time, and neither can multi-cam and cropping. If you turn multi-cam on while effects or a crop are active, Homecrate clears them first. Pick one or the other for a given take.
Limitation: Flipping the camera is disabled while recording and while multi-cam is active.
The Effects Drawer
Tap VIDEO FX to open the effects drawer.
[SCREENSHOT: VIDEO FX drawer — layer stack on the left, effect library chips below]
Effects Stack as Layers
This is the single most important idea on this page. An effect isn’t a mode you switch to — it’s a layer you add. Layers run top to bottom: the first layer processes the camera frame, the second processes that result, and so on. Reorder them and you get a genuinely different look from the same ingredients.
Each layer has:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| BLEND | How much of this layer’s output is mixed over what came in. 0 = invisible, 1 = fully replaces |
| Parameters | Up to six sliders per effect, named by the effect (e.g. amount, speed, scale) |
| X / Y | For touch-driven effects — where in the frame the effect is centered |
| AGE | For touch-driven effects — how long the touch “lingers”, 0–5 s |
| EXEMPT | Which protected subjects this layer is still allowed to touch (see below) |
| REACT / SRC / L M H / THRESH | Audio-reactive modulation (see below) |
Blend is the underrated one. A wild effect at blend 0.25 layered under a subtle grade often looks far better than the same effect at full strength on its own.
The Effect Families
There are 62 effects. Rough groupings, so you know where to look:
| Family | Roughly | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Subject-aware | 4 | Preserve Me, Preserve Instrument, Instrument Ignite, Face Privacy |
| Broadcast decay | 7 | Glitch, CRT Monitor, TV Static, Bad Antenna, Split Scan |
| Tape & film | 4 | VHS Tape, Super 8, Chewed Tape, Shuttle Scrub |
| Dream & glow | 6 | Dream Haze, Glitter, Star Field, Ethereal Aura |
| Color grading | 9 | Duochrome, Solarize, Thermal, Neon Edge, Chromatic Split, Topographic |
| Generative & atmospheric | 5 | Aurora, Plasma, Magnetic Field, Smoke Reveal |
| Liquid & ripple | 7 | Underwater Caustics, Live Ripple, Liquid Chrome, Liquid Mirror, Melt |
| Warp & space | 8 | Kaleidoscope, Vortex Spiral, Wormhole, Black Hole, Gravity Wells |
| Destruction & dissolve | 6 | Datamosh, Shatter Glass, Disintegrate, Pixelate Mosaic |
| Art & illustration | 5 | ASCII Art, Xerox Zine, Scribble, Emboss, Frosted Glass |
Most of them animate on their own. Two are touch-interactive — you place them in the frame with the X/Y sliders.
Preserve Me and Preserve Instrument
Big video effects have an obvious problem: they eat the performer. Smear the frame enough to look good and the human being playing the guitar disappears into it.
Homecrate’s answer is two shields. A shield is an effect layer whose job is to protect something, not to look like anything.
Preserve Me
Add Preserve Me and Homecrate recognises you in the frame and keeps you looking like yourself. Every chaotic thing happening in the room stays in the room. You stay sharp. It all happens on your device, live, while you play — nothing is uploaded.
- soften feathers the edge where you meet the effect, so you don’t look like a sticker pasted on top.
- invert flips the whole idea: now only you get the effect and the room behind you stays real. Great for hologram and ghost looks.
Preserve Instrument
The second shield does the same job for the instrument in your hands. Homecrate recognises the instrument you’re holding and can protect it independently of you — so you can keep the guitar clean while the room melts, or the other way around.
The drawer shows a SEES chip naming what it currently recognises — “Guitar”, “Piano”, “Violin” — or Looking… while it works it out. That chip is your feedback loop: if it isn’t naming your instrument, improve the lighting or hold it more clearly in frame before you record.
[SCREENSHOT: Preserve Instrument layer with the SEES chip reading "Guitar"]
Honest expectations: both shields work from the live camera picture in real time — this is not a frame-by-frame edit done afterwards. Fast movement, low light, busy backgrounds and unusual instruments all make them less certain, and you’ll see that in the edges and in what the SEES chip reports. Do a short test take before committing to a performance.
The EXEMPT Chip — Who Is This Layer Allowed to Touch?
This is the concept that trips people up, so it’s worth slowing down on.
Once you’ve added a shield, every other layer needs an answer to one question: “are you allowed to touch the protected stuff?” The EXEMPT chip on each layer is that answer. Tap it to cycle through four states:
| EXEMPT reads | The layer is allowed to touch | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Protected | Neither you nor your instrument — the room only | Chaos effects. Datamosh, Shatter, Black Hole, TV Static: destroy the room, leave the player alone |
| Body | You, but not the instrument | Effects on the performer while the instrument stays clean and readable |
| Instrument | The instrument, but not you | The instrument glows, burns, shatters — you stay untouched |
| Body + Inst | Everything, the whole frame | Grades and washes. A CRT scanline pass or a color grade should cover the entire image, shields included |
The name is worth re-reading once: exempt means exempt from the shield, i.e. this layer ignores protection for that subject. Protected (the default) is the most conservative setting — the layer stays off both you and your instrument.
A practical rule of thumb:
- Destructive / chaotic layers → Protected
- Full-frame grades, scanlines, vignettes, film stocks → Body + Inst
- A single hero effect meant to hit one subject → Body or Instrument
Face Privacy is a deliberate exception: it defaults to Body + Inst. If it didn’t, Preserve Me would win and your face would come through unblurred — which is not what anyone wants from a privacy effect. Face Privacy also lets you pick your own IMAGE overlay (a transparent PNG works best) to put over your face instead of a blur.
Audio-Reactive Effects
Any layer’s parameters can be driven by the music.
Homecrate listens to your mix and tracks how much energy is in three ranges — LOW, MID, HIGH. The readings jump quickly on a hit and ease back down afterwards, so they move musically instead of flickering. Then you wire that energy to a parameter.
| Chip | What you set |
|---|---|
| REACT | Which parameter of this layer gets modulated |
| SRC | Where the energy comes from: the Master bus, or any single track in the project |
| L / M / H | Which band(s) drive it — kick-ish lows, body/vocal mids, cymbal-ish highs |
| THRESH | How loud the source has to get before the parameter starts moving |
[SCREENSHOT: Audio-reactive row — REACT, SRC, L M H pills and the THRESH slider, with live band meters]
The mapping is simple and predictable:
- Silence = the value you dialed in on the slider.
- A hard hit = the parameter travels all the way to its maximum.
- Everything in between scales between the two.
So you tune the look you want at rest with the slider, and the music pushes it upward from there. Live band meters in the drawer show you what Homecrate is hearing, so you can set the threshold by eye instead of guessing.
Picking SRC as a single track instead of the master is where this gets good: pin an effect to the kick track and it pumps on the beat instead of on everything at once.
Note: L / M / H are three broad ranges, not a spectrum analyser. They’re there to give you a steady, immediate sense of “how hard is this hitting”, not a pitch-accurate frequency readout.
Instrument Ignite
The showpiece. Instrument Ignite takes the instrument Homecrate recognises in your hands and turns it into an energy source that responds to how you play.
At rest it’s a warm glow. As you dig in, a molten plasma core builds inside the instrument, a neon rim lights its silhouette, an aura spills out into the room around it, waves radiate outward, and embers drift off. The color palette runs hotter as energy climbs, pushing toward white at the peaks.
Wire it to your guitar track with SRC and it burns in time with your playing — quiet passages breathe, a hard strum ignites.
[SCREENSHOT: Instrument Ignite — guitar glowing mid-strum with embers drifting]
Presets
Factory Presets
There are 23 factory presets, and none of them are “one effect turned on”. Every one is a composition of 3–5 layers with hand-tuned blends and shield exemptions — the kind of stack you’d build over an afternoon of experimenting. Nine of them are audio-reactive out of the box.
| Group | Presets |
|---|---|
| Preserve Me | Untouchable · Hologram · Static Ghost · Terminal World · World On Fire · Neon Outline |
| Preserve Instrument | Sacred Instrument · Enchanted Axe · Molten Strings · Arc Reactor · Only The Music |
| Everything else | Late Night Cable · Signal Lost · Split Feed · Tape Graveyard · Seek & Destroy · Dream Sequence · Ghost Trails · Heartbeat Bloom · Prism Pop · Midnight Aurora · Fever Duotone · Disco Panic |
Molten Strings is the flagship — start there if you want to see what the whole system is capable of in one tap.
[SCREENSHOT: Preset overlay — factory presets grid with Molten Strings highlighted]
Load a preset and then keep editing it. Change one blend, swap the top layer, retarget the audio source to your own track. Presets are starting points, not endings.
Your Own Presets
Once you’ve built a rig you like, save it. Your presets are stored with the project database and can be replaced or deleted later.
Homecrate also auto-restores your last-used rig the next time you open the camera, so you don’t have to rebuild your look every session.
Old presets are safe: when one loads, Homecrate clamps any out-of-range values and quietly skips effects that no longer exist, so a preset saved on an older version can’t break the camera.
Turning Effects On and Off (and Why It Pauses)
Adding your first effect, or removing your last one, makes the camera settle for a moment — the preview may hitch or briefly go black before it comes back. That’s expected, and it only happens at that zero-to-one and one-to-zero boundary; adding a second, third or tenth layer is instant.
Two things follow from it, and both are worth planning around:
- Do your effect setup before you hit record, not between takes you care about.
- Multi-cam can’t be combined with effects at all — see the limitation under Framing: Cameras and Crops.
Tips
- Do a 10-second test take first. Check the SEES chip is naming your instrument and that the edges of the shield look clean before you play the whole song.
- Add your shield layer, then build on top of it. Every layer you add afterwards gets an EXEMPT decision, and it’s much easier to think about that when the shield is already in place.
- Use blend, not brute force. Three effects at 0.3 blend usually beats one effect at 1.0.
- Full-frame grades go on top with EXEMPT = Body + Inst. A grade that stops at your silhouette gives the whole thing away.
- Point SRC at one track, not the master. Reacting to the kick or to your own guitar is far more musical than reacting to the whole mix.
- Set THRESH by watching the band meters while the song plays, rather than guessing a number.
- Crop before you record, not after. 9:16 for stories and shorts, 1:1 for grid posts, 4:5 for feeds.
- Balance Backing and Mic before you save. A performance clip usually wants the mic higher than a song-showcase clip does.
- Bright, even light makes both shields dramatically more reliable than a dim room does.