Reel Maker
Drop in whole phone videos and a song. Get back a reel cut to the beat.
No trimming, no timeline, no AI. Just video and audio analysis with FFmpeg, OpenCV and librosa.
Try it at makemyreel.in →
Why
Making a Reel usually means trimming every clip by hand and lining the cuts up with
the music yourself. Reel Maker does that part: you add whole, untrimmed clips and it
picks the moments and syncs them to the song.
What it does
- Picks the best moments from long videos: sharp, well-lit and moving, skipping
blurry or shaky bits and near-duplicate photos.
- Cuts to the beat: finds the song's tempo and bars, starts the music at its
liveliest part, and puts every cut on a beat.
- Opens strong: the best shot goes first, then your moments in the order they happened.
- Handles phone media: iPhone HEIC photos, HDR (HLG/Dolby Vision) video tone-mapped
to SDR, rotated and variable-frame-rate clips.
- Three styles: Hype (fast cuts), Smooth and Cinematic (longer shots, gentle zooms).
- Songs from a YouTube link or a name: the link is only used to read the title; the
audio is the official 30-second iTunes preview. Or upload your own audio file.
- Posts cleanly to Instagram: you get the reel with music and a silent copy, so you
can add the same song inside Instagram without copyright muting.
- Private by default: no account; uploads are deleted as soon as the reel is made,
and finished reels after 20 minutes.
How it works
photos + videos ─► probe ─► proxies ─► analysis ─┐
(HEIC, HDR→SDR, (sharpness, ├─► planner ─► edit list ─► render ─► reel.mp4
song ────────────► beats, bars, energy motion, │ (pick, order, (EDL) (FFmpeg) + silent copy
(librosa) duplicates) ─┘ time to beats)
Module (engine/reel_engine/) | Role |
|---|
probe.py | Identify photos/videos/audio by content; size, rotation, HDR, capture time |
proxy.py | HEIC decode, sRGB, HDR→SDR tone-mapping, 30 fps working copies (cached by content hash) |
analysis.py | Sharpness, exposure, colour and detail, motion, scene cuts, perceptual hash |
music.py | Beat tracking with a confidence check and fixed-grid fallback, bars, energy, start point |
songs.py | YouTube link → title (oEmbed) → iTunes Search preview |
planner.py | Varied shot selection (duplicates held back), hook-first ordering, beat-locked timing → EDL |
edl.py | The edit-decision list format and its validator |
render.py | Parallel per-clip rendering, concat, loudness-normalized music, output checks |
webapp.py + static/ | The web app: chunked uploads, limits, render queue, result pages |
presets.yaml | Pacing and scoring weights for Hype / Smooth / Cinematic |
The planner is deterministic: the same media, settings and seed always give the same reel.
Run it locally
You need Python 3.12+ and FFmpeg (with ffprobe) on your PATH. On Windows you
can instead put ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe in tools/ffmpeg/; the gyan.dev
"essentials" build includes zscale, which HDR tone-mapping needs.
python -m venv .venv
.venv/Scripts/pip install -e "engine[dev]" # macOS/Linux: .venv/bin/pip
.venv/Scripts/reel ui # opens http://localhost:8765
Command line
# find a song from a YouTube link or name, and download its 30 s preview
reel song "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRXx6U8ABQ" --pick 1
# make reels from a folder (all three styles, 15 s)
reel make path/to/trip --song songs/The-Weeknd-Blinding-Lights.m4a --preset all --out out
Other options: --song-search "artist - song", --length 7|15|30|60, --seed N (a
different variation), --plan-only (write the edit list without rendering), and
reel render out/hype.edl.json to re-render a saved plan.
Deploying
DEPLOY.md covers both options:
- Cloudflare Containers (what makemyreel.in runs on): a Worker in front of one
container, deployed by GitHub Actions on every push to
main, with safe switch-over
to new versions.
- Free, on your own PC: a
workers.dev address through Cloudflare Tunnel.
The public site limits each visitor (uploads per hour and day, renders per hour), each
reel (30 files, 5 minutes of video) and each file (photos 30 MB, videos 400 MB and 3 minutes).
Tests
.venv/Scripts/python -m pytest engine/tests # everything (~4 min)
.venv/Scripts/python -m pytest engine/tests -m "not ffmpeg and not network" # fast unit tests
The end-to-end tests generate phone-like media (HEIC, rotated video, HLG HDR HEVC,
duplicates, a corrupt file) and a synthetic song with a drop. engine/tests/golden/
holds an edit-list snapshot; regenerate it with UPDATE_GOLDEN=1 after an intended
planner change.
Project layout
engine/ Python package: the editing engine, CLI and web app
reel_engine/ probe, proxy, analysis, music, planner, render, webapp
tests/ unit, end-to-end and web tests
cloudflare-container/ Worker + container setup for makemyreel.in
cloudflare/ Alternative: Worker for the free home-PC option
scripts/ Windows helpers (start on login, restart the live site)
Dockerfile The container image
docs/ Plan and README media
Ideas and contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome. Things I'd like to add: letting one long video
supply as many moments as the reel needs, transitions and speed ramps, and keeping
finished reels in Cloudflare R2.
Have a suggestion? Use the email link on makemyreel.in, or open an issue.
Credits
Demo footage and photos: free stock media from Pexels.
Demo music: "Upbeat" by prettyjohn1 on Pixabay.
License
MIT © 2026 Hardik Sharma
