Flixlar Effect Editor (Beta 1)

What is the Effect Editor?

The Effect Editor is a new, standalone view in Flixlar for creating custom visual overlays — particles, glows, animated UI elements, anything you can imagine as canvas code — and compositing them on top of your video. Effects can react to your video's audio waveform, run on their own timeline, and be exported as a transparent WebM or a PNG sequence.

It's currently in beta. The core workflow is solid, but it's new, so treat it as an experimental addition alongside Flixlar's caption and subtitle tools.

How it works

The Effect Editor doesn't generate code itself — instead, it builds a complete, ready-to-use prompt and lets you bring your own AI:

• Describe the effect you want, e.g. “floating neon particles that pulse with the beat”
• Click Copy prompt and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or any AI tool you prefer
• Copy the code you get back and paste it into the Code Editor

Flixlar plays your effect live on a canvas, synced to your video's resolution, frame rate and duration, so you can see exactly how it will look before exporting anything.

Example prompts

Effects work best when the description is specific about motion, color and how it should react to sound:

• “Falling snow with a subtle glimmer effect”
• “Warm fire waves at the bottom of the frame that move with the waveform”
• “Drifting stars and particles that pulse in rhythm with the audio”
• “Retro game HUD with a speedometer and audio-reactive VU meter”

Reacting to your audio

Generated effects have access to your video's audio waveform through the canvas API, so an AI can make particles, glows or UI elements pulse, grow or shift color in time with the sound — not just play on a fixed loop.

Exporting your effect

Once you're happy with an effect, export it as:

• Transparent WebM — a single video file with an alpha channel, ready to overlay in other tools
• PNG sequence — one PNG per frame, saved to a folder you choose

Long exports stream frame by frame with a progress bar, so exporting an effect over a full-length video won't freeze the app.

Using an effect as a layer

Check Use as layer before exporting a WebM, and Flixlar saves the effect into your project as a reusable layer — visible in the new Layers tab, alongside your video track. From there you can edit an effect (reopening the prompt and code you used to create it) or delete it from the project.

Saved effect layers are automatically burned into your final video export, composited alongside any existing watermark or captions — no extra export step required. This requires your project to be saved first, since Flixlar needs to know where to store the effect files alongside it.